Rebeccanyc's 2012 Reading, Part 2

I am starting a new thread for May.

30. The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri

I owe thanks to several people on LT for recommending Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano crime novels to me. This, the first in the series, was delightful for its wit, satire, characterization, and portrayal of a Sicilian town and its social environment as much as for the mystery and its several twists and turns. It made for a fun and light read at a time when I'm too busy to concentrate on some of the more serious and grim books I usually read. I've already ordered some more Montalbano books.

31. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin

Far more accessible than the other works by Sorokin that I've read -- the experimental The Queue and the massive and stunning Ice Trilogy -- this book nonetheless exhibits Sorokin's dazzling writing and paints a damning portrait of power. It is 2028 in Russia and a new tsar is in power, with a regime that combines the worst of the original tsarist reign, Stalin's terror, and the corruption of the post-communist era. Russia has built walls around its boundaries and limits the flow of oil to other countries, while buying virtually all its products from China, now the other great power in the world. And the tsar has recreated the oprichniks, a secret police force modeled on the one employed in the 16th century by Ivan the Terrible; the 21st century oprichniks combine medieval methods of killing and torture with ray-guns, and drive around with the heads of freshly killed dogs on the hoods of their cars.

The novel portrays one day in the life of a high-up oprichnik, Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, from the time he staggers out of bed, massively hungover, until the time he falls unconscious back into it at 4 the next morning. In between, he participates in several executions, travels to Siberia and back, ingests a massive amount of drugs (including some bizarre hallucinogenic fish) and alcohol, oversees a cultural performance, visits a fortune-teller and the seductive wife of the tsar, negotiates "insurance" with Chinese truckers, bonds with his fellow oprichniks both mentally and physically, and reflects on his importance and his love of Russia. As Sorokin portrays them, the oprichniks are almost a cult, albeit an extremely powerful and extremely vicious one, getting together frequently to share meals and vices, and tossing out a variety of repeated phrases such as "Work and Word," "Hail," and "Thank God." Futuristic technology merges with old-fashioned fist fighting, as the oprichniks serve the tsar by putting down "sedition" while enriching themselves at the same time. Religion has made a comeback, and swearing is forbidden, but there seems to be no limit on killing, raping, pillaging, and indulging bodily desires, at least for the elite oprichniks. Power continues to corrupt.

Sorokin intersperses the novel with poems and songs, and I am quite sure that there are many references to Russian literature and history that I completely missed.

Came close to buying a couple of Sorokin's novels last week but was not so familiar with them. Will certainly go and get one or two now based on your dazzling review. Congrats on your new thread too btw.

Thank you! I was looking for something that picked up the theme of future-Russia. I read Moscow 2042 not long ago. It was I suppose a satire on the reformists, the counter-reformists and the all encompassing corruption. Except that the current day antics of Russia and the former Soviet Republics seem to be outdoing anything that from the satirists pen. So Sorokin sounds very promising, even if I find I suspect he´s also writing about present day horrors under the guise of ´future-fiction´. I just finished Lermontov´s A Hero of our Time with its description of Russian brutality in Chechnya in 1839. Nothing ever really changes. I wouldn´t worry about missing cultural references, I´ve always had trouble remembering Russian names and have read War and Peace twice without quite knowing who was who all (or most) of the time. Cheers.

Interesting about A Hero of Our Time, which I haven't read, because when I read Tolstoy's Hadji Murat I came to the same realization about the history of Russia and Chechnya.

By the way, on the subject of future Russia, I read 2017 by Olga Slavnikova a few years ago and was under-impressed by it.

I was just going to ask you about the Slavnikova novel -- didn't she win the Russian Booker or something like that? I never bought it, but keep meaning to add it to my library list.

Yes, she did, Suzanne, although I was hard-pressed to see why when I read it. Some of the ideas in it, and the descriptions of the mountainous landscape, were interesting, but the writing was terrible, the plot confused, and the characterizations difficult to believe.

32. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I have no interest in zombies, and have never read anything about them before, so why did I read this book? The answer is that wandering_star gave it such an intriguing review that I decided to get it, and found it mostly very absorbing. Written as a series of interviews with survivors of a global war against the zombies, including people who fought against them in various ways and people who are dealing with the aftermath, the book is roughly chronological, starting with the first and mysterious appearance of the zombies, and continuing through initial reactions, the "Great Panic," and then the war. At the time of the interviews, the earth has mostly but not entirely been reclaimed for humanity, but pockets of zombies remain both on the earth and in the oceans.

This book is really about people and how we respond to crisis; the zombies are the crisis, but thankfully for me they were not the focus of the book because they are really disgustingly creepy. As wandering_star noted in her review, the stories of individual people and their actions and thoughts are far more interesting than the somewhat stereotyped geopolitical reactions. Some of the sections were quite moving, many were exciting, and a few were a little overly military-techy for me, but all in all I think Brooks achieved a good mixture of types of people and types of situations, as well as covering the globe, and sea, air, and space as well as earth itself. His thinking about how zombies and a war against them would affect the environment was interesting too.

As a novel that is a lot about psychology, of course it speaks to how we would respond to any global crisis -- and with increasing globalization, crises, whether they be infectious disease, war, environmental degradation, economic, or whatever, are increasingly global. There is food for thought in this book.

>9 rebeccanyc:: now you see, I never would have picked a zombie book up either. I've found myself stretched a few times by other LTers reviews and just might pick this one up if I stumble across it.

33. The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri
34. The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri
36. Voice of the Violin by Andrea Camilleri
37. Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri

What can I say? I'm hooked! After reading my first Inspector Montalbano mystery, I became entranced by the characters, the place, the humor (both gentle, as Rachel says in #25, and more pointed), the food, and of course by Salvo Montalbano himself and his ways of subverting bureaucracy to do the right thing for people, thinking of literary references at the oddest times, and refusing to talk while he's eating. They are light but substantive at the same time, so that even thought I'm reading them to avoid concentrating on anything more serious, I don't feel I'm consuming fluff. Camillleri is particularly skilled at pacing and at creating memorable characters, and I was a little disappointed that one of my favorite characters from the first book was killed in the second, and that another retired after the third book, but I'm sure he'll keep other interesting ones coming.

35. Europe Central by William T. Vollman

This is an extremely ambitious novel that is at times breathtaking and fascinating and at times tedious and boring. Vollman attempts to interweave the history of Soviet Russia from the time of the revolution with that of Germany from the post-world war I period, through the second world war and into the cold war era as a way of illustrating how people confront horror and evil, totalitarianism and moral decisions. He introduces a cast of hundreds, focusing on a group of fictionalized real people -- artists and musicians (including, most extensively, Shostakovitch) as well as generals, revolutionaries, and party leaders. Hitler ("the Sleepwalker) and Stalin themselves play a role too, largely offstage.

I am glad I finished this book, and yet I feel I didn't get as much out of it as I could have. It demands careful, concentrated reading, and because it is a tome (not portable on the subway) and because real life was very busy, I read it in discrete bursts, over the course of nearly two months. Thus, I lost some of the connectedness between people and sections, because I just couldn't hold everything and everyone in my mind between reading binges. Furthermore, the book is full of references to history, people, classical literature and music, etc., and at first I was checking the dictionary and Wikipedia every page or so, but after a while I gave up because it interfered with reading. So I missed a lot that way too. Also confusing is the changing narrator, different for Russia and Germany, different even for different sections; I was often unclear about who was telling the tale and what his perspective was (however, I think this was intentional on Vollmann's part). Finally, music is very important to this book, with lengthy sections devoted to the creation of several of Shostakovitch's compositions as well as metaphoric allusions to Wagner's ring cycle and Parzifal, and I didn't think I was completely in tune with what Vollmann was trying to accomplish.

Yet, despite these feelings of not getting it, I found much of the book stunning. Vollmann did a phenomenal amount of research, including among original sources (some of which is noted in his endnotes), but somehow synthesized it into amazing, often poetic, writing and a story that very rarely seems forced. I found many of the individual human stories compelling, and occasionally moving. The novel has a broad sweep both geographically and temporally ("Far and Wide My Country Stretches" is the title of one section and of a movie by Roman Karmen, a Soviet documentary film maker who is one one the characters) and also probes into the intimate thoughts of its characters. The novel brings home the destruction and horror of the 20th century, particularly its middle part, in central Europe.

And what of Europe Central? I confess I'm not entirely sure what Vollman is getting at here, but from the very beginning of the book a telephone, and the whole idea of a switchboard, sometimes connected, sometimes not, at the heart of central Europe, i.e., Europe Central, is prominent. The means of communication? The source of death and chaos? There is a lot of food for thought in this book, and I know I only scratched the surface.

38. The Smell of the Night by Andrea Camilleri
39. Rounding the Mark by Andrea Camilleri

I'm addicted! I have three more on order, but I'm going to do my best to read something else.

I'm so glad you took the plunge with Montalbano, I'm waiting for the next one, The age of doubt. Enjoyed your review of Europe Central but doubt that I have the patience to read it myself.

Thanks, Kerry!

Wonderful to see how much you're enjoying the Inspector Montalbano books, Rebecca. They're faves of mine, too. Like Kerry, I'm waiting for the new one, which comes out in the U.S. this month.

I don't usually read crime novels, but I must say, between you devouring them and Richard's very funny review, I am intrigued. The Shape of Water, huh? As for Europe Central, it sounded appealing, but I'm thinking not. I don't have time for it now, and I think I'd rather read some more nonfiction first (i.e. Bloodlands, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, or one of the other 15 books you've recommended!).

Lisa, I used to read a lot of mysteries in my 20s and 30s, but have kind of gotten out of the habit. I am definitely enjoying the Camilleris and am finding the mystery aspect almost secondary to my engagement with the characters and the scene. But it's definitely easy escapist reading for me. And, thanks Joe. I'm dreading getting to the point where I have to wait for the new one to come out, but I can see I'm headed in that direction!

I have mixed feelings about Europe Central. I'm glad I read it, because I've been meaning to for years, and it was fascinating and poetic in many ways, but it was hard to avoid thinking about Vollmann patting himself on the back for taking on such an ambitious work. I can't recommend Bloodlands highly enough, but I haven't actually read the Stalingrad book, although I have it on the TBR. Only 15?!

Hi Rebecca, after I posted a brief commentary/review of the book A Meaningful Life I spotted yours, which is much better and more clearly captures succinctly the gist of the whole story.

If I had read yours first, i would have written my review as something like: "Just read Rebecca's, don't look any further!"

Must get one of those Montalbano books for the dog days of summer.

Rebecca - Lovely to see you skating through Montalbano with a vengeance. Like Kerry and Joe I am already in the position of awaiting the next translation to appear which you will probably get to next week by the looks of it. You are right the "mystery" is very much secondary to the characters and the food. I also have Europe Central on the shelves and I have thought it looks a tad imposing - your thoughtful review makes it no less so, but I will get to it eventually.

Thank you, xieouyang! I must say I've blissfully forgotten about that book!

Only 15?! Only because I prioritize books you recommend to the top of my list, and once I read them I remove the "rec by rebeccanyc" label!

Rebecca, your sprint through the Andrea Camilleri is cracking me up. I've only read the first one (or two?) but you're making me think this is a series worth moving up in the pile. Perhaps good summertime reading.....

40. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

I really enjoyed rereading this (for a group read over in Club Read), and first I will link to my original review because I really don't have a lot to add to it.

I did find myself thinking more, on this read, about the role of the Pontius Pilate story, beyond serving as a counterpoint to the Moscow story and commenting on it. That is, is there more to make of the religious aspect of the story as opposed to the political and the personal? And also, I thought more about about the role of Ivan Homeless who, as the translator Richard Pevear points out in the introduction to my edition, appears from the very beginning of the book to its very end and is the one person who hears both Woland's version of the Pontius Pilate and the master's. I can't say I came to any conclusions, but I'd be interested in what anyone else thinks.

41. The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri

Another one!

I had not read that review of The Master and Margarita, Rebecca, and liked it very much. What a book!

42. Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri
43. August Heat by Andrea Camilleri

Wondering what I'll do when I get to the end!

44. Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir

I wanted to like this book better than I did, both because I was taken by the title and because two LTers (Lisa and Lois) wrote intriguing reviews of it. There were parts of it I really enjoyed, but I wasn't completely drawn into the story or its location, and the ending completely turned around what I was thinking about one aspect of the book and left me puzzled.

The novel tells the story of an 11-year-old girl, Billie, who is sent to what appears to be some sort of small summer camp in a remote, idyllic, and bucolic farming valley, which nevertheless is in a war zone. One day the war intrudes, and Billie is left alone in the farmhouse with a young soldier, Rafael, who no longer wants to be a soldier but who can't entirely give up his soldierly ways even though he has taken on the role of the farmer, and in some way the protector of Billie. On the surface, Billie seems largely unperturbed by this change, just as she hasn't seemed to miss her mother and father, although she thinks about them frequently. Her father is described as a puppet whose individually limbs are controlled by beings from another planet, and who is writing a book of laws of the earth/humans for those people on another planet, while her mother works as a doctor and organizes the household. Billie also thinks about a former ballet dancer, Marius, who used to work at the farm, and who had been in love with someone named Maria. As the novel progresses, various people drop by the remote farm, and the reader sees some evolution in Rafael's attitudes in how he deals with this intrusions. Billie, too, evolves a little as summer drifts into fall.

The best parts of this book for me were some of the details: Billie's play with her Barbie dolls reflects the violence of the world outside the farm, the chickens at the farm act like chickens and the cow acts like a cow, Billie reflects on the invisibility of children or on how her mother taught her to act with other people. But for me, the story and plot, such as it is, were confused by the remoteness of the farm (which still appears to be in a contemporary European country), by the characters of Billie and Rafael, neither of who feels completely "real" to me, and by the puppetry imagery which I took to be metaphoric and psychological, but which may not be.

The cover describes the book as "a lyrical and continually surprising take on the absurdity of war and the mysteries of childhood." Although some horrifying things occur in the book, the war in many ways feels far away (at least for someone who has read other books about war) and the farm life seems much more real, and the depiction of Billie's behavior seems remote as well. Just as the beings from another planet appear to control Billie's father, so the telling of this story seems distanced from the lives of Billie and Rafael and the chickens and the cow.

28> LOL --- you may well have withdrawal symptoms!

45. The Box Man by Kōbō Abe

This is almost certainly the most mystifying book I have ever read! At the start of it, the narrator (or one of them) describes what a box man is (a man who lives with a box over his head that reaches to his hips and that contains the various items he needs for daily life) and says: at this juncture, the box man is me. It gets less clear from there.

In the first part of the novel, the box man describes how to make a box, his life as a box man, how someone else (?) became a box man, being attacked with an air gun, and so on. I found this section even more claustrophobic than I found Abe's The Woman in the Dunes and was almost ready to give up. Then more characters enter the novel including a woman who acts as a nurse and a doctor who may be the person who shot him and may be a fake box man and may be a figment of the box man's imagination. The narrator box man believes, or dreams, or writes, or fantasizes that the nurse has made a deal with him to pay him for the box, but he wants to return the money she has given him. The scene switches to the hospital and its housing area where the doctor and nurse work and live -- either it really shifts or it shifts in the box man's imagination.

There the box man's feelings about sex and love start to emerge. He seems to want contact with the nurse, but mainly just to see her naked. He was formerly a photographer and the idea of seeing without being seen is threaded through the novel in various ways, from taking pictures, to living in a box, to turning out the light, to hiding and looking, and more.

Later we learn a little more about the history of the doctor and the nurse (and another doctor who the doctor is pretending to be and who became addicted to morphine, and who may or not be the same doctor, or even the box man himself), and then there is a box man corpse too. Although some of this is told in a more realistic tone, it is unclear who the narrator is. At the very end, there is a revelation about an event in the box man's childhood that may shed light on his sexual psychology and psychology in general. In fact, there is a lot about sex in the book, including the narrator box man's idea that the legs are the most erotic part of a woman because they enclose her sexual parts (and I note that the box of a box man stops at his hips, so just his legs are exposed). In addition, the book includes grainy dark photographs with captions that are seemingly unrelated to the story.

I've read other reviews of this book, but I still really don't know what to make of it. It is clear that Abe is commenting in some way on how we try to hide ourselves, how repression eventually expresses itself, how we avoid looking at some people and long to look at others. But what this all means, and how to sort out the confusion of characters, narrators, real box men, fake box men, and so on, and whether in fact this is all some sort of drug-induced dream, or all the male characters are aspects of one character, is beyond me.

#45 That entitles you to three more Montalbano's, back to back!

Hah! Good prescription.

Very funny, Linda. I feel one sneaking up on me, even though I've already started the new Mario Vargas LLosa, The Dream of the Celt.

Kudos to you, Rebecca. I see that 4 of the 5 LT reviews of The Dream of the Celt are in Spanish.

Yes, the English translation has just been released. I'm a big MVL fan, but so far this one isn't like a lot of his others in that it's a more straightforward narrative than I'm used to with him. Tried to read the Spanish reviews but can only say I got the main idea, not the details.

46. The Wings of the Sphinx by Andrea Camilleri
47. The Track of Sand by Andrea Camilleri

Only two more left! I'm going to hold off on them for a while until I next hit a period of needing something light. (Or at least that's what I'm telling myself this morning!)

I predict that Rebecca will spend part of her summer learning Italian, so that she can start reading Camilleri's untranslated novels.

Hah! I love how much you're enjoying the Camilleri books, Rebecca. Me, too. What a thrill to come upon a series you like so much, isn't it?

Yes, indeed, Joe! The last mystery series I galloped through was Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series, and that was probably ten years ago or more.

Very funny, Darryl, but I did check Camilleri's author page and he's written tons of books that haven't been translated; however, it's Inspector Montalbano who I'm in love with.

Over on Paul Cranswick's 75 Books thread, people have been posting their favorite books by decade (plus or minus) of publication. So far, we've done books published from 2000 on, 1990s books, and 1980s books. I thought I'd post them here too, so I can keep track of them better.

If I had to pick my favorite books written in this millennium, which I guess I would distinguish from the best, my top favorites would be (not in order):

Favorites of this Millennium (so far)
Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Great House by Nicole Krauss
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
GB84 by David Peace

Runners Up
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Lush Life by Richard Price
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Runners Up to the Runners Up
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh
The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Favorites of the 1990s

American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
She Drove without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon
In Red by Magdalena Tulli

Favorites of the 1980s
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
The Scapegoat and The Killing Ground by Mary Lee Settle (the last two books of her Beulah Quintet)
Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Maus by Art Spiegelman
A Perfect Spy by John le Carre
The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
The Prospector by J. M. G. Le Clezio
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago
The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin
Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel

Rebecca, I lost the thread of Block's Matthew Scudder books a while ago. Thanks for the reminder to look them up again! And you've inspired me to look for the Inspector Montalbano series, as well.

Nice to see you here, Rosalita. One of the reasons I loved the Matthew Scudder series was the real New York feel of them (real places) and, as with the Montalbanos, the recurring characters.

I agree about the sense of place in the Scudder series. I find that more and more, it is the recurring characters who draw me and keep me reading a series, mystery or otherwise. I can forgive a lot of plot holes when the characters are engaging!

Scudder, before and after he stopped drinking, had a habit of ending up in Armstrong's on 9th Avenue, and many years before I discovered Scudder, I discovered great hamburgers and a very large cat at Armstrong's, around the corner from my office. That makes the stories so real.

How cool is that to have a personal connection to a place that is pretty much a character in the series itself, given how often it figures in to the stories! I am not that familiar with NYC, but I do remember those books being the first ones that helped me understand just how people do live in such a big city. I felt pretty envious of them (and now you, Judy!)

Yes, cool that you had a connection to Armstrongs! I remember going by it and realizing that it was indeed a real place.

On Paul Cranswick's thread, people have been posting their favorite books by decade (plus or minus) of publication. So far, we've done books published from 2000 on, 1990s books, and 1980s books. I thought I'd post them here too, so I can keep track of them better.

If I had to pick my favorite books written in this millennium, which I guess I would distinguish from the best, my top favorites would be (not in order):

Favorites of this Millennium (so far)
Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Great House by Nicole Krauss
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
GB84 by David Peace

Runners Up
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Lush Life by Richard Price
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Runners Up to the Runners Up
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh
The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Favorites of the 1990s

American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
She Drove without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon
In Red by Magdalena Tulli

Favorites of the 1980s
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
The Scapegoat and The Killing Ground by Mary Lee Settle (the last two books of her Beulah Quintet)
Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Maus by Art Spiegelman
A Perfect Spy by John le Carre
The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
The Prospector by J. M. G. Le Clezio
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago
The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin
Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel

And here is my 70s list. This includes both books that were influential for me then (e.g., Fear of Flying and Small Change) and books I've read later.

Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Light Years by James Salter
The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott (started in the 60s)
Prisons by Mary Lee Settle (one book of The Beulah Quintet)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Small Change by Marge Piercy
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies

One of the interesting aspects of making these lists is that I see that I have increasingly been reading international writers, books from earlier times, and books by women as I've grown older.

I couldn't make a list like this as I didn't keep written records before LT--unless, is it since you've joined LT?

Tui, for clarification, these aren't books I read in those decades; they're books published in those decades. Most of them I've read more recently, but some I did read closer to when they were published. I only have complete lists of books I've read from 2008 onwards and partial lists for 2006 and 2007 (I joined in July 2006 -- Thingaversary coming up!).

I selected my fiction tag and then sorted my library by date and then double checked pub dates to make these lists.

Yup but I didn't know how far back you were going...wow, six years for you! Thanks for how to sort by date.

Also, my library includes all my books, including ones that date back to when I was in school and even older books from my parents' apartment, not just books I've read or acquired since joining LT.

48. The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa

If I hadn't seen Mario Vargas Llosa's name on the cover of this book, I would not necessarily have known he was the author, even though I have read nearly all of his previous novels. A fictionalized biography of Roger Casement, The Dream of the Celt has few of the hallmarks of Vargas Llosa's writing that I have come to love. Instead of moving back and forth in time and from character to character, often within the same paragraph if not within the same sentence, the narrative is completely straightforward, although chapters dealing with Casement's final days as he waits to be hanged for treason are alternated with chapters covering his earlier life. Instead of creating vivid characters, even his imagined Casement feel flat. Instead of immersing the reader in the action (in a way that can often be confusing), Vargas Llosa provides dates and facts in a more obvious way than many history books. (Note: I haven't read his other fictionalized biography, of Gauguin, in The Way to Paradise.

Where this book does feel like Vargas Llosa is in the themes: the exploitation of indigenous people in Africa and the Peruvian Amazon by European companies (specifically rubber companies), the brutality of absolute power and the corruption it engenders, and the horrors of colonialism. It is thus easy to see why he would be interested in Casement, who was born in Ireland, served as a British consul in what was then the Belgian Congo and eventually, after he came to see the destruction, human and environmental, caused by the rubber industry, was charged with investigating and reporting on it for the British government, first in the Congo and later in the Peruvian Amazon. He was knighted for this work by the British. However, as he worked on these human rights investigations, he connected more and more with his Irishness and latent Catholicism (he was raised Protestant, but his mother had him secretly baptized as a Catholic) and to a view of Britain as a colonial power in Ireland. Thus, he came to know and work with many of the Irish leaders, in Ireland and in exile, who were working for Irish independence, and was one of the Irish leaders who collaborated with the Germans at the outbreak of World War I to encourage them to support an Irish rebellion against the British. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend?) He traveled to Germany and tried both to enlist Irish prisoners of war in an Irish brigade and to have the Germans ship guns and other weapons secretly to the Irish planning the Easter 1916 uprising. Believing in the end that the Germans would not support the uprising, he traveled to Britain on a German sub to try to stop it, but was captured and sentenced to death for treason. Friends and colleagues appealed for mercy, but much of this support melted away after the British discovered some diaries, alleged to be Casement's, which detailed homosexual encounters; over the years, there has been controversy about whether these were real, but I believe they are now believed to be, and Vargas LLosa does too.

This could have been a fascinating biography, and it could have been a fascinating novel, but as a hybrid of the two this book didn't really work for me. It had too many facts and details for a novel, and too much of Casement's imagined thoughts for a biography. Vargas Llosa is such a brilliant writer, and many of his novels are among my favorite reads, but he is better when he lets his imagination run and when he creates worlds that seem real than when, as in this book, he does extensive research (a page and a half of thanks at the end of the book) and seems to feel he has to show he read it all instead of integrating what he learned in a creative way. For me, the best section was the section on the Peruvian Amazon, which he knows better, and which therefore seemed more "real" than the Africa and Ireland sections; it makes me want to go back and read The Green House, a novel about the same region that I found both compelling and mystifying when I first read it.

Great review Rebecca- from now on I will abstain from reviewing books and just read yours!

I read this book in Spanish when it came out two years ago and enjoyed mostly because it was informative, even though I had read a few years back King Leopold's Ghost that covers some of the same ground.

Have you read La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat) about the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic? If not, you must.

Thanks! Yes, I've read The Feast of the Goat. I liked it, but it isn't one of my favorite Vargas Llosas. I liked The War of the End of the World, Conversation in the Cathedral, Captain Pantoja and the Secret Service, and Death in the Andes more.

Another thoughtful, well considered review. Thanks, Rebecca.

49. The Potter's Field by Andrea Camilleri

The next to last one. I feel withdrawal pangs already!

50. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore

Be virtuous then and forward press,
To gain the seat of happiness.

Historian Jill Lepore begins her entertaining, enlightening, and disturbing "history of life and death" with the story of "games of life," board games initially designed to instill moral and Christian values in children; hence the one called "The Mansion of Happiness" from whose instructions comes the above quote. In 1860, Milton Bradley (yes, that Milton Bradley) introduced the Checkered Game of Life, which takes players from birth or just after to "happy old age." In earlier games, players advanced through virtue and fell back through sin, but in Bradley's game they lose by failing to take advantage of opportunities to succeed. As Lepore writes, "he took a game imported from India and made it into the story of America. He turned a game of knowledge into the path to prosperity." She goes on to note that with "the secularization of progress and the rise of individualism . . . the shape of a life was changing. . . . The sun still set at the end of every day, but now you could turn on the lights and day would never end. . . Novelty replaced redemption."

And so begins the collection of interconnected essays that, through portraits of individuals, their work, and their social environments, plot changes in our thinking, largely from the mid-1800s through the early and mid-20th century, about everything from birth to death, with mother's milk, children's literature, learning about sex, contraception, eugenics, marriage counseling, household efficiency, instructions for parents, old age, the right to die, and cryonics in between. In the course of these essays, she discusses the politicization of issues relating to the "rights" to life an death.

Lepore has the wonderful ability to take a point that seems obvious once she mentions it and then develop its implications. One that particularly struck me is that for centuries there was no concept of "parenthood" because adulthood implied parenthood since adults had lots of children and often died while there were still children at home. Older siblings helped care for younger siblings, and thus learned about baby and child care. But once women, especially educated and middle class women, started delaying marriage and children and reducing the size of their families, children grew up without the experience of caring for younger children and thus, when they became parents themselves, felt at a loss about what to do. Enter the concept of parenthood, the creation of Parents magazine, and the beginning of articles that promised to tell parents how they could avoid perils they previously never knew existed. Similarly, and largely for marketing purposes, the classical three ages of man (youth, adulthood, old age) have been extended to include adolescence (and now "tweens"), middle age, and more

I've been a fan of Jill Lepore since reading her more conventionally historical New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan and her pointed and extremely witty The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History in which she debunks the founder obsession and anti-historical approach of the Tea Partiers. In fact, one of the things I love about Lepore is that how witty she is, in addition to being insightful, thought-provoking, and readable. So I will end this review by quoting from the book, first from her introduction and then from her conclusion.

"A great many questions about life and death have no answers, including, notably, these three: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when you're dead? These questions are ancient; they riddle myths and legends; they lie at the heart of every religion; they animate a great deal of scientific research. No one has ever answered them and no one ever will, but everyone tries: trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask." (pp. xvi -xvii)

"I have come to believe that what people think about life and death has a good deal to do with how they think about the present and the past. Hiding between the covers of this book, then, lies a theory of history itself, and it is this: if history is the art of making an argument by telling a story about the dead, which is how I see it, the dead never die; they are merely forgotten or, especially if they are loved, remembered, quick as ever." p. 192

Fascinating book and review. I've never read Lepore. Another author to look forward to!

51. Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli

When I read Tulli's In Red last year, I was so absorbed in her creation of an unreal world filled with clearly envisioned people, beautiful writing, and illusion and allusion that I nearly missed my subway stop twice. This novella, her first, also is filled with beautifully poetic writing and illusion and allusion, but I never got that absorbed in it. I am impressed by what Tulli has accomplished, but I am quite sure that I really didn't understand a lot of it.

The book describes the creation, life, and decay of an unnamed city which, as the novella progresses, appears to be a mythical version of Warsaw (described as a city with the straight lines of W's and A's in its name). In the beginning, the dichotomy of tree-like growth (natural, uncontrolled, always branching, balanced by an equally large root system) versus machine-made growth (human-directed, controlled, always increasing, balanced by an "anti-city") is established, and later the dichotomy of dreams and stones. At times the city seems to grow to encompass the world, and the skies and the stars; at times later in the book, it both seems to contain other (named) cities and to be apart from them. There are times when the mood of the people is described, but they are always spoken of generally; there are no individual characters. This description is much more straightforward than the book itself!

As the city grows, there were places where I felt Tulli was commenting on some of the history and politics of Warsaw and Poland itself, although I am not familiar enough with that to catch more than a few allusions. Certainly the determination to destroy the anti-city could allude to the communist era, as could the awards for manual and machine workers who accomplished a lot in little time. The choice of train lines heading east (to Russia) or west (to Paris) could refer to different pulls on the Polish people. But I have to stress that all of this happens in the most allusive way, so it is possible to understand it in different ways.

Tulli's writing is poetic, and a delight to read, and this book is more a collection of imagery and a parable than a novel. Some of the recurring images and ideas are architecture and lines (straight versus meandering), shifts in time and space (also true of In Red), the ephemeral quality of dreams (and us?) and the permanence of stone. Other readers have commented that Tulli has translated Calvino and that there are echoes of his Invisible Cities in this book; I have that on the TBR and will get to it soon.

All in all, I am glad I read this book, but I'm especially glad I read In Red first, as I would not have been so enthusiastic about Tulli I had come to this one first.

In Red, that's the one I meant to look for at the book sale, but all I could think of is Pamuk's My Name is Red. Rats.

Lisa, I nearly always forget the books I want to buy when I get to a bookstore! That's partly why I succumb to impulse so much.

That's one of the catch-22s about LT. I always have an extensive list of books recommended by LTers that have been vetted and I will probably enjoy, but less time (and money) for sheer browsing and serendipitous purchases. That said, I did pick up a book for the Middle Eastern theme read that was a total unknown.

Rebecca -trust you had a lovely weekend and that your reading continues it's magisterial progression.

Thanks for stopping by, Paul. Trying to read, but as our 4th of July holiday is coming up, and we are about to be inundated by relatives, my reading time will probably be reduced for a few days, alas.

Oh dear. Relatives in NYC on the 4th.

Actually, we're upstate. Much nicer weather, but I'd really like to just sit on the porch and read!

Ah. Much better.

Today my cousin's wife (who I like a lot) and I are escaping the chaos by driving to the post office and the market. Such are the choices of diversion up here, at least for those of us in this tick-infested year who don't dare venture into the woods.

At least you're not sweltering in the city!

No, I am sweltering in the country, sans AC. But we have an "attic fan" that pulls the cooler air in once it gets cooler out than in, so we can sleep comfortably at least. Back to NYC tonight and hope to catch up with both reading and LT over Friday and the weekend.

Rebecca, did you see this article from today's Guardian about Andrea Camilleri?

Andrea Camilleri: a life in writing

Thanks for that link, Darryl. I don't follow the Guardian so I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

52. The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri

Interrupting my tome reading with some lighter fare, I've now finished the most recent Montalbano mystery to be translated into English. Fortunately, LT's series page tells me there are four more that are as yet untranslated. Camilleri has also written a variety of other works, but none of them have been translated into English . . .yet!

Jealous Rebecca as The Age of Doubt hasn't made it to these shores yet. Darryl's Guardian article was interesting too.

Ha ha, Paul! It was you who got me started on this addiction!

I'm halfway through The Age of Doubt and enjoying it a lot especially as I'm also slowly getting through Only Yesterday which is a completely different type of book.

Darryl, thanks also for the link to the Guardian article.

53. Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge

Victor Serge was born in exile in Belgium in 1890 and died in exile in Mexico in 1947. In between, he was jailed at least three times (once in France, twice in the Soviet Union) and internally deported to Orenburg in the the Ural Mountains, fled Paris just ahead of the Nazis, and barely made it out of occupied France. Also in between, he participated in the innermost circles of the Russian Revolution, fighting in one of the fiercest battles of the civil war, going on foreign missions for the Communist Party, and having access to both Lenin and Trotsky, before becoming disillusioned by the totalitarian turn the Communists took and, ultimately, by that same authoritarian trait in Trotsky. Throughout all this time, he was writing, with his work mostly published in western Europe.

Born of Russian parents who fled to the west because of their own revolutionary activities, Serge became interested in socialist and anarchist politics as a teenager and began his life-long connections with most of the European activists and revolutionaries of the first part of the 20th century. After being jailed in France, he traveled to Spain and met Catalan rebels, returned to Paris, and wound up in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd, later Leningrad), at the Finland Station, in 1919. In the course of his years in the Soviet Union, he not only clearly saw the perils and evils of the path the Bolsheviks were taking, but spoke up about them, as a member of the so-called Left Oppositionists that initially clustered around Trotsky. The inevitable happened: he was jailed, then released, jailed again, and then sent to Orenburg, where he was allowed his books and his family, but where starvation was never far away. Because of his western citizenship, and because his writing was published in France and elsewhere, the Soviets were under pressure to release him, and he was ultimately expelled to the west. Once there, his life was made difficult not only by the anti-communists but also by the left, because he was persona non grata for having criticized what was going on in the Soviet Union and both Stalin and Trotsky. Nonetheless, he maintained his connections to a vast network of socialists and others who, like him, believed in democracy, free speech, and the rights of the individual as well as social revolution.

What makes this book so fascinating, in addition to Serge's presence at some of the seminal events of the last century and in addition to his sparkling writing (also evident in his excellent novels), is his amazingly clear perception of what was really taking place, when the vision of so many others was clouded by wishful thinking; his total commitment to tolerance and individual freedom; his ability to continue to look to the future despite the horrors he personally endured; his remarkable prescience and psychological/political insight (e.g., of why Stalin had to kill off the entire first generation of Bolshevik revolutionaries, and of the direction the second world war would take); his sharp portraits of dozens and dozens of people, some I'd heard of and many more I hadn't; and the broad perspective it opened up for me of the extent of the revolutionary activity in Europe and the mixed reaction to that by the Soviets (e.g., they appeared to help the republicans in the Spanish Civil War by sending them arms, while at the same time killing all the leaders who didn't toe the Stalinist line).

Serge clearly saw that the world had changed after the First World War, and that it was once again heading to disaster with the Second. Nonetheless, he believed in progress, perhaps slow and halting, but inevitable. As he says in the final section of his memoirs:

"The men of my generation -- those born around 1890 -- above all the Europeans among them, cannot help the sensation of having lived on a frontier where one world ends and another begins. . . . I have seen the face of Europe change several times. . . .

"Here we are, with the nightmare of war behind us, but without peace having been made, without a feeling of man's deliverance, without even a vague reawakening of the great hopes that signaled the end of the First World War. We feel trapped between the aggressive crushing power of a totalitarianism born of born of a victorious socialist revolution and the routines of an old society committed, in spite of itself, to changes it refuses to recognize. On both sides, primitive man, barbaric and narrow-minded, greedy and mendacious, is working against better man. . . .

"The future seems to me, despite the clouds on the horizon, to be filled with possibilities vaster than any we have glimpsed in the past. The passion, the experience, and even the errors of my fighting generation may perhaps illumine the way forward, but on one condition, which has become a categorical imperative: never to give up the defense of man against systems whose plans crush the individual." pp. 446- 447, NYRB edition

The NYRB edition I read is the first complete translation of this book; the publisher of an earlier edition forced the translator to cut a significant portion of the text because he thought it was too long. For this edition, a new translator uncovered the deleted portions and retranslated them, but I couldn't tell where one translation merged into another. The edition is also enhanced by a lengthy glossary of people and revolutionary movements and by drawings by Serge's son Vlady, an artist, as well as by photographs.

thumbs up for your excellent review. It sounds like a very fascinating book.

Excellent review, Rebecca. I will be looking for that one.

ETA: I ordered it. Couldn't help myself!

Echo the comments on an excellent review Rebecca. I saw this book in the shops here and was intrigued by it. Will get it for sure now.

Thanks, Linda, Linda, and Paul. Hope you like it, Linda (laytowoman), and Paul, see if you can get the new NYRB edition because it's the only complete one.

Rebecca, have you read another of Serge's works The Case of Comrade Tulayev? I read it a couple of years ago, in fact it was the first of Serge's novels that I'd read. It is a fascinating tale of the brutality, uncertainty and idiocy of the Soviet regime. I think it's a must read for people who still have romantic ideas about Communism.

Yes, I've read that that and the two other Serge books that have appeared in English translation (all published by NYRB editions, as the Memoirs were): Unforgiving Years and Conquered City. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was the first they published and the first I read, and it got me started on reading everything he wrote that's been translated.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary was a book that really inspired me when I read it in my late teens/early 20s. I also read some of his novels, Birth of Our Power and Conquered City. I couldn't resist buying the new version.

I found it in a really bizarre way - the Guardian newspaper sells books by mail order (including all the books they review) and publishes a column of supposed bargains which aren't really bargains, such as supermarket offers which turn out to be more expensive than buying not on offer. Someone pointed out a howler from the Guardian bookshop and they published a picture of a top 10 list which included this wonderful book.

Today is my 6th LT anniversary, and it is hard to believe that six years have passed since I discovered this wonderful site and then all you wonderful people who try so hard to increase my TBR pile! Seriously, I can't imagine how I ever lived without LT; I have enjoyed "meeting" so many of you and the scope of my reading has expanded thanks to all your reviews and recommendations. Thank you!

In LT tradition, I have visited a few bookstores over the past few days, and between them and an Amazon order I have acquired (or will, when Amazon delivers) the six books to celebrate these six years. Here they are.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnot
The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes
The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Here's to the next six! Happy reading to all!

#85 elkiedee, I wasn't aware of Birth of Our Power until you mentioned it. I see it's out of print, but I just visited Amazon and discovered two other books, not fiction, by Serge which I've added to my wishlist there.

Happy Thingiversary Rebecca. Looks like a great selection!

54- 56 The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies
54. The Rebel Angels
55. What's Bred in the Bone
56. The Lyre of Orpheus

Above all, Robertson Davies is a story teller. Even at his most scholarly (and he can be scholarly), his vividly drawn characters and wizardly plotting propel his narrative forward and delight the reader. While his subjects can be serious, he writes with verve and a wonderful sense of humor.

The three books in this trilogy are linked by the characters, particularly by Francis Cornish (who is dead for the entire first and third novels), as well as thematically. They focus on art in many of its forms (literature, painting and drawing, and music and theater), explore myth and the mystical, delve into psychology, theology, and history, educate the reader about subjects as diverse as gypsy techniques for restoring violins and art restorers' techniques for matching older paints, play with ideas about what is real and what is fake, treat readers to the conversations and thoughts of daimons and souls in limbo, and poke fun at the conventional and the respectable. Davies achieves the admirable goal of making the reader think and laugh at the same time, and become fond of the characters -- the major ones and the dozens of minor ones -- and their foibles.

I am going to briefly describe each of the novels, with the caveat that each could be discussed at infinite depth.

The Rebel Angels
The first novel introduces most of the major characters of the trilogy soon after Francis Cornish, an eccentric and rich art collector and connoisseur, has died. He had appointed three of the characters, all affiliated with the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost, affectionately known as Spook, to essentially act as his artistic executors. That narrative of one of them, Simon Darcourt, an Episcopal priest who has become a college professor, alternates with the narrative of Maria Theotoky, a brilliant and beautiful graduate student, the daughter of a gypsy mother, who is pining away for the professor she works for (another of the executors) while pursuing her studies of Rabelais. The plot thickens with a missing and valuable manuscript and the reappearance of a disgraced former professor.

The world of academia and the world of the gypsy mother and her tarot cards provide a fertile field for Davies as he explores, in various guises, the alchemical process of creating gold from base materials (some very literal base materials, in fact). As always with Davies, the story, which veers towards the melodramatic at the end of this novel, exists on several levels -- the literal, the psychological, and the mythical -- and gives him ample opportunity to skewer academic pretension and the implacable ignorance of those who think everything must serve a practical purpose.

What's Bred in the Bone
In the second novel of the trilogy, Davies steps back to explore (with the aid of the daimon Maimas and the Lesser Zadakiel, the Angel of Biography), the life of Francis Cornish from his beginnings in a remote and backwards logging town to his time in Europe before, during, and after the Second World War, and his subsequent return to Canada. It is a story of a child learning to understand his world and its secrets, largely on his own, and largely through drawing; of a young man who is introduced to secrets of other kinds, artistic and otherwise, while suffering from discovering some of the secrets of love. Again, we the see the transformation of material objects, from paintings that are mediocre to ones that are better, to an exchange for something still better, and we see Francis's transformation into an artist and a lover, both, however, briefly. And, again, we see Davies' wit and humor, and his penetrating psychological and mystical insight

The Lyre of Orpheus
In the final novel of the trilogy, Maria from the first novel has married Arthur Cornish, Francis Cornish's nephew and heir, and they have established a foundation to carry out Francis's legacy. Their first project is supporting an unformed but brilliant young musician who is attempting to fulfill the requirements for her doctorate by completing an unfinished opera about King Arthur by E. T. A. Hoffman. At the same time, Simon Darcourt, again from the first novel, is struggling with his biography of Francis, also commissioned by the foundation, because he doesn't know, what readers of the second novel know, about Francis's wartime years in Europe.

The creation of the opera gives Davies free rein to depict the artistic and theatrical processes, explore connections between the contemporary characters and those of the Arthurian legend, introduce some wonderful new characters to the mix, and allow some familiar characters the opportunity to grow and discover themselves. Towards the very end, Davies quotes Keats: "A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory -- and very few can see the Mystery of his life." Davies' genius is that he lets us see the mystery and the allegorical aspects of his characters while keeping their feet firmly on the ground of this world.

Great reviews. I've been meaning to read Davies, but never got around to him. Thanks for the rec.

#89: I really must finish out the Cornish trilogy one of these days. Robertson Davies is one of my LT discoveries and I have now been privileged to read several of his books. Thanks for the reminder, Rebecca.

Thanks for stopping by, Judy and Stasia. I first read Davies only a few years ago, and it was because of a group read of Fifth Business in another group. I then went on to read the rest of The Deptford Trilogy, and bought the Cornish one, but it languished on the TBR until now.

>89 rebeccanyc:: Standing ovation!!!! Just loving it that you are enjoying Robertson Davies. Happy Thingaversary, Rebecca, and happy reading. Your adventuresome reading spirit has lit the way for me on a few reads now and I'm happy to continue following your little candle through the world of books.

Thanks for the reviews- Robertson Davies is one author that I have to reread! and Happy Thingaversary!

Tui, it is thanks to you that I'm reading Robertson Davies!

57. Distant View of a Minaret, and Other Stories by Alifa Rifaat

Alifa Rifaat was an Egyptian writer who wrote in the 1950s - 1980s and lived a largely very traditional life. Her stories focus on the lives of women, often in rural settings, and present a straightforward view of sex, love and its absence, and death Women's lives are hard, and Rifaat shows their struggles for happiness in a culture in which men often do not live up to the family and sexual obligations required by their religion. Some of the most moving stories involve the closeness some of the characters to the rural world and its animals, more so, perhaps, then to other people. The daily five calls to prayer set a rhythm for the book, and mark the passing of time. As with any collection, some stories are better than others, but taken together they provide a vivid sense of time and place and the limitations of a world in which a women's role is circumscribed not only by poverty but also by oppressive tradition.

58. The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes

Wow! I woke up in the middle of the night feeling I had to finish this book before I could go back to sleep! Hughes creates the tension felt by the protagonist, a young Los Angeles doctor driving to Phoenix for a family wedding, so well that I felt just as anxious as he did all the way through the book, starting at the very beginning in which his discomfort at picking up a young female hitchhiker might seem a little out of proportion. There is a reason, and it is the famous "surprise" of the book, which I will not reveal, although there is a lot I could say about it. Once in Phoenix, in the midst of a lovely family gathering and an introduction to a beautiful, poised, and intelligent young woman, he is still uneasy about the girl, and then finds out she has been killed. Soon, the police are after him, and it becomes up to him to find the real killer and prove his innocence. Throughout, Hughes masterfully creates the scene, the building tension, and the characters.

There was one thing that bothered me about this book, which was written in 1963, and I have to consider it an artifact of the times, but every single character in the book is utterly appalled and disgusted by the idea of abortion.

That might be more the writer's viewpoint than the time of the writing.

That's a good point, Judy; she's so progressive in other respects that didn't occur to me.

59. Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami

As I was reading this book, which I read for the Author Theme Reads group, I thought that the only thing I could say about it is that if I had ever wanted to lead a completely dissolute life this book would have dissuaded me. Page after page of impersonal and sometimes violent sex, drugs of all sorts, rotting food, and a variety of bodily fluids and bodily reactions. Who of my generation would have thought sex, drugs, and rock and roll could be so disgusting? But, on reflection, I realized that towards the end of this mercifully brief novel, the narrator, Ryū, reveals a remarkable observational and imaginative capability (although what is hallucination and what is real is hard to say), and some of the characters exhibit some fond feelings for their families or home regions. So maybe there's a glimmer of hope.

As an added note, I found the treatment of the African-American soldiers from the nearby US air base quite stereotypical.

I like Murakami but I think I'll give this one a pass.

This is the other Murakami, Tui. Ryu, not Haruki.

Tks for the reminder that I have the Salterton trilogy lurking here.

And yes, you put Victor Serge's memoirs on my radar screen as a must-own book!

If you're curious, you might want to check out Villa Air-Bel by Rosemary Sullivan. It's the story of Varian Fry, who organized the escape of Victor Serge and many others (including Alma Mahler) from Occupied France. Serge and his son Vlady make up a big part of the narrative -- there are some hilarious stories of them undertaking surrealist art experiments in the villa of the title in which an incredible array of 'unacceptable' people lived while awaiting a passage to Lisbon and safety. Very readable; very good.

Thanks, Suzanne, for that information about Varian Fry and the Rosemary Sullivan book. I actually have a book by Fry, Surrender on Demand, somewhere on the TBR. Will have to look for it.

>102 rebeccanyc:: Duh. Thanks.

Nice reviews, and nice Thingaversary haul, Rebecca! I'll have to come back to your comments about those books later this week. I'll definitely read The Colonel soon, probably next week, and I bought Dowlatabadi's other novel that has been translated into English, Missing Soluch, which I'll try to get to this quarter.

Belated happy Thingaversary, Rebecca!

60. Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

Journalist Blaine Harden's story of Shin Dong-hyuk's escape from the North Korean slave labor camp in which he was born is by turns horrifying, shocking, deeply saddening, and modestly inspirational. Camp 14 is one of the six labor camps in North Korea, camps large enough to be visible on Google Earth that have, as Harden points out, "existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps." Estimates of the number of prisoners in these camps range from about 150,000 to 200,000. The camps vary in the degree of severity with which the prisoners are treated, but Shin's camp, number 14, was a "complete control district" for "irredeemables." According to Harden, it "holds an estimated 15,000 prisoners. About thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, it has farms, mines, and factories threaded through steep mountain valleys."

In Camp 14, sex between the prisoners was forbidden, but Shin's mother was "given" to his father as a "reward marriage," essentially a means for rewarding prisoners who exceeded work demands as well as breeding new workers for the camp. Children born in the camp were sent to school, but received only a minimal education in writing and arithmetic from the guards who served as teachers (they didn't learn much reading because the only book in the classroom was the teacher's). They learned nothing about the world outside the camp, not even the usual North Korean propaganda, and there were no pictures of the Kim dynasty anywhere to be seen. Instead, they learned to inform on their peers and their parents, to obey the guards and meet work quotas, and (on their own) to scrounge for food without being caught (including rats and insects). They were always hungry. Mostly, as school children they were sent to help out at various work sites.

Remarkably, Shin's mother and brother tried to escape. He was tortured to "find out" what he knew (described in horrific detail, not for the faint-hearted) and ultimately witnessed their executions. The book, which is based on Harden's interviews with Shin, as well as a document Shin wrote for a South Korean human rights group, then describes the various kinds of work Shin was forced to do from the easy (working on a pig farm), to the the difficult but well fed (building a hydroelectric dam), to the challenging (repairing sewing machines in a textile factory). In Shin's world, nobody trusted anybody, but eventually he is paired with a new prisoner, one who had experience in the outside world, and his eyes are opened and he starts planning his escape.

Harden mixes his discussion of Shin's experiences in the camp and during his escape and subsequent attempt to adapt to a life of freedom with information about what was going on in North Korea during this time period and how it affected Shin's ability to escape; he also describes how South Korea is responding to the influx of North Korean escapees. Once free, Shin has to learn how people interact with each other when they are not terrorized and how to cope with his horrific experiences and newly developing conscience and sense of guilt. As he says towards the end of the book, "I did not know about sympathy or sadness. . . .They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I have learned to cry. I feel like I am becoming human. . . . I escaped physically. I haven't escaped psychologically."

I snapped up this book when I saw it in a bookstore because I was so fascinated when I read Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy. It is a compelling complement to the stories she told.

What a sick, sick, sick society that was/is. You have more fortitude than me. Could not read that.

Escape from Camp 14 looks like the sort of harrowing yet rewarding read I have come to look for from your thread (the thread itself is not harrowing btw). I think I read a review of this a while ago and meant to track it down - your timely reminder should ensure I do so. Have a wonderful weekend.

Tui, I agree; this isn't a book for you.

Paul, "harrowing yet rewarding"???? Aren't you the one who introduced me to the delightful Inspector Montalbano?

#108: Adding Escape from Camp 14 to the BlackHole. Thanks for the recommendation, Rebecca!

I think that's one you'll appreciate, Stasia. Thanks for stopping by.

#113: My local library actually has a copy (although it is checked out currently), so hopefully I can get my hands on it soon.

Rebecca - Montalbano harrowing?!

61. Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski

Originally published in 1948, and considered one of the best Polish postwar novels, Ashes and Diamonds takes place in a Polish town in the days just before and after the German surrender in May 1945. The Soviet army has liberated the town from the Nazis, and it is still unclear what exactly will happen. The town is awash in former Polish Home Army soldiers (although unnamed as such since the Soviets had already taken over by the time of publication), local and Soviet communists, bureaucrats looking to advance, a somewhat discomfited aristocracy, returnees from Nazi concentration camps, teenagers who grew up in the chaos of the war and seem to have no values, those who seek to make money no matter who is in power, and of course regular folks. The novel switches back and forth between various people and their stories, and it takes a little while to figure out who is who and how they are connected.

Essentially, Andrzewjewski portrays people who have had to confront issues of ethics and conscience during the war, or are continuing to confront them, and how they individually decide to act. There are plots to kill people, plots to betray people, and yet people are intertwined in ways that can be awkward, at best, in the fluid situation; for example, the head of the local communists, mourning the death of his wife in a concentration camp, has to tell her sister about her death, and the sister is one of the local aristocrats. Everyone comes together at the town's hotel, the Monopole, which is striving to recapture prewar days, and they all certainly drink as if there is no tomrrow.

The title of the novel comes from a poem by Cyprian Norwid, that asks:

"Will only ashes and confusion remain,
Leading into the abyss? -- or will there be
In the depths of the ash, a star-like diamond,
The dawning of eternal victory!

It is hard to see the diamond in these ashes.

The edition I read had two introductions: one, by Heinrich Böll, written for an earlier edition, before the Wall came down, and one written by Barbara Niemczyk in the post-Communist era. Both point out that, for Polish readers would have immediately understood the unexpressed reality that the Soviets who "liberated" Poland were the same Soviets who occupied it in the days of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. In addition, Niemczyk notes some errors in the translation, including two long sections that were omitted by the original translator. Finally, I found it disconcerting that the Polish names were "translated" into English (sometimes incorrectly as Niemczyk points out); for example, the Polish name Maciek becomes Michael and Jerzy becomes Julius. I would have preferred it if the translator kept the Polish names.

115. Paul, I meant that you shouldn't consider everything in my thread harrowing, since it includes the delightful Montalbano. Sorry I wasn't clear!

116: That sounds really irritating - I would have guessed Jerzy to be related to George rather than Julius, as the Czech is Jiri with an accent on the r (it's pronounced like the french je combined with a very rolled r and I found it very tricky but very common in Czech). But I would also prefer original names in any language.

That was one of the names that was mistranslated, although I would have to check to see how. Will let you know when I get back home.

62. White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov

"Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the revolution had begun." So begins Mikhail Bulgakov's tale of Kiev in the chaos of the Russian civil war. In the Ukraine, not only are Bolsheviks, the "Whites" (a loose conglomeration of anti-Bolsheviks of various stripes), and the Ukrainian nationalists under Petylura competing for control, but the Germans, who had put their puppet leader (the Hetman) in charge during the just ended World War I, are still hanging around. In the space of a few years, Kiev was to go back and forth among the warring factions at least eighteen times.

The story focuses on two brothers and a sister, Alexei, Elena, and Nikolai Turbin. Their mother has just died; Alexei, a doctor like Bulgakov, has recently returned from serving in the army; and Elena's new husband, Talberg, is on the verge of leaving to join a White general far away. The family lives in a large, cozy apartment, filled with books and memories; the beauty of the city of Kiev is lovingly described. But, as quoted in the introduction to the edition I read by Evgeny Dobrenko, Bulgakov wrote, in an essay on Kiev, "The legendary times came to an abrupt end, and history intruded, suddenly and menacingly."

In the novel, Bulgakov shows what happens when Petlyura's army of peasants from the countryside take over the city. In advance, the Germans and the Hetman flee, as do many of the army's officers and soldiers, leaving the city to scattered groups of eager but inexperienced and under-armed individual soldiers who are incapable of fighting the forces arrayed against them. Both Alexei and Nikolai become involved in the doomed fighting, along with some of their friends. The bulk of the novel covers just a few dramatic days. Throughout, we see not just the Turbins and their friends, but also the broader picture, the epic sweep of the nationalist forces (the countryside versus the city, the peasants versus the intelligentsia), the rumor-mongering within the city and the easy acceptance of the people of their new rulers, the antisemitism of the nationalists (heralding a pogrom under a later nationalist regime), and the abandonment of the city by the leaders and military. The courage and noble acts of the Turbins cannot stop the tide of history.

Bulgakov's writing is a delight. He paints a portrait of a beautiful, if legendary, city, and the stars and planets above, and displays deep familiarity with its streets and routes around and through it; he evokes the sounds of the phones and doorbells ringing, of cannons booming, of guns going off; he refers to Russian literature; he inserts a somewhat comic character in the form of a downstairs neighbor; he recounts his characters' dreams; and above all he brings to life the cold, the turmoil, the danger, the bravery and cowardice, the fear and love, of a confusing and frightening time. Like The Master and Margarita, it has religious references, in particular to the Book of Revelation (helpfully footnoted by the translator). This may be Bulgakov's first novel, but he is fully in control of the diverse techniques he uses to make this chaotic world real to the reader.

Although this novel could not be published in Russia until the 1960s, an adaptation of it became a play, "The Days of the Turbins," that became a Moscow hit and a favorite of Stalin's -- it must have been quite an adaptation, because there is no way that the book I read would have been acceptable to Stalin. I understand that this edition is the first complete translation into English of the novel.

And in the end?

"Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, but more terrible still was 1919."

"What had it all been for? No one could say. And would anyone pay for the blood?

No. No one would.

The snow would melt, the green Ukrainian grass would come up and plait the earth, lush sprouts would emerge, the heat would shimmer above the fields, and no trace would remain of the blood. Blood is cheap in these dark red fields, and no one would ever redeem it.

No one."

Great review, Rebecca, and one big fat green thumb from me for it. Must try to find this one.

There is just no way to dodge the hail of book bullets that come from your thread, Rebecca. Another one for the wishlist.

Two fantastic reviews Rebecca. I have both books Ashes and Diamonds and The White Guard on my shelves somewhere and will try to read at least one of them next month.

Thanks, Tui, Linda, and Paul, and sorry, Linda!

63. Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet

This is a charming, slight book by a man who has a personal library of more than 40,000 books. At first, I was enchanted by it, as many fellow LT book lovers might be, as he discusses what other people ask people who have lots of books, accumulating books versus collecting them, finding kindred spirits, the comfort of having books we just might want to read someday, systems for arranging books on the shelves, and more, interspersing his own thoughts with quotations from other writers and references to books he has read, many of which sound intriguing (there's a bibliography at the end). I found too many wonderful comments to even think of picking ones to quote here. But as I read on, I felt he was trying to write enough to make it a book (it's only 123 small pages) and the topics he was discussing were less compelling. Still, it's a quick read, and there's a lot that's fun. The introduction by James Salter, one of my favorite writers, was enjoyable too.

I am far from having 40,000 books (or the room to store them), but the questions he poses are ones all bibliophiles face. Arrangement, oy. Trying to weed, hopeless. How to get more shelf space, a question for the ages. Sounds like a fun little book.

Lisa / Rebecca - my solution is to get a bigger house rather than dispose of the books! I probably have somewhere north of 10,000 books when I get them catalogued and have been known to buy one or two more occasionally. I am incidentally hoping to move next year and have home library very much in my plans.

I read Phantoms on the Bookshelves a few weeks ago and while I was pleased to have read it I didn't feel that I could overly recommend it to others. Much as I love my books, I'd hate to have to fit 40,000 books into my home.
Love your review for White Guard, I'll have to add that to my tbr list.

I love your solution, Paul! I would love to have a home library. We looked at a house in Vermont one time that had a round room at the top of the house with curved bookshelves doing a 360 and a spiral staircase up to the room. There was a gorgeous view and comfy chairs on the landing. Definitely drool-worthy. But we ended up staying in Seattle.

Lisa I am hoping to find a nice elevated bit of land and build a home with the help of an Architect friend of mine - the place I have in mind is called Planters Haven and it is a around 20 miles south of Kuala Lumpur. SWMBO doesn't want to move so far; so I am trying to entice her with it as an investment opportunity and then charm her into the move - a tall order actually!

Your Vermont house sounds just my thing too.

I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 print books, and another 200+ e-books. I can't imagine buying too many more books than I already own (famous last words).

Good luck to all of you and your library lust! I just have a lot of floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases on almost every available wall . . . I will probably run out of space in another couple of years, and I already double-book for things like mysteries and TBR piles.

Ten years ago, when I downsized from a small two-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment, I had a decision to make. I could either keep the seven bookcases full of books, or the bed.

I sleep on the couch.

Good choice @rosalita!

64. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Globalectics is Ngũgĩ's combination of globalism and dialectics. In this book, a collection of the talks he gave for the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California at Irvine, he discusses the fight to convert the English literature department at the University of Nairobi into a Literature department, and world literature generally, and the fight to give orature (a coinage to avoid the oxymoron of "oral literature") an equal place with the written word in the academic world. These are the interesting parts of the book. Unfortunately, at least for me, because perhaps I am theory-challenged, a lot of the book involves putting his theses into the theoretical formats of Hegelian dialectics and what he describes, in an introduction, as "poor theory," which seems to mean doing a lot with a little, or perhaps just using the simplest idea that will work. I found these sections added to the length of this slim volume, but didn't necessarily add to my appreciation of his ideas.

And his ideas are interesting, if not entirely novel. Initially, he focuses on the relationship between the "English master" and the "colonial bondsman," and makes the point that the "bondsman" always knows a lot about the "master," while the "master" knows next to nothing about the "bondsman." More interesting, perhaps, is his discussion of the education of the "bondsman" and how African and other writers educated in the European system have been able both to view some of the European classics in different ways (e.g., Shakespeare not just as an example of the height of English culture but also as a writer whose works depicted people in different relationships with power) and to take aspects of European literature and use them in their own works (e.g., titles of books such as Achebe's Things Fall Apart or his own Weep Not Child, or styles or themes; he cites Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood, which I've read, having "affinities" with Zola's Germinal, which I hope to read soon).

In the later lectures, he discusses how we define and understand the term "postcolonial" as different cultures can be postcolonial at different times and in different ways, and more generally how we can read literature from a variety of perspectives as well as from the perspective of the writer and his or her times, and he focuses on the vitality and significance of orature, which includes not just story-telling but song, and he adds in dance and music. In one section I found particularly interesting, he talks about how orature reflects a world view that "assumes the normality of the connection between nature, nurture, supernatural, and supernurtural" and that this derives in some cases from the language itself, giving the example of some words in Gĩkũyũ. I certainly felt when I read Matigari that Ngũgĩ was using the tradition of story-telling, with each version of the tale a little different, in this work.

All in all, I found some interesting ideas in this book, in between the theoretical parts. It was marred, shockingly for a book published by Columbia University Press, by some outrageous typos: "Virgina Wolfe," "As You Like" instead of "As You Like It" for the Shakespearean play, etc.).

Isn't it a pity that copy editing has taken such an economic hit? At least I assume that's what it is, and not just a reluctance to confront a careless author.

But the book does sound interesting, in the way all the books of criticism languishing on my TBR have sounded interesting. Maybe when I retire....

Somehow I don't think these were the result of a careless author, but rather "corrections" introduced by an illiterate copy editor or, more likely, proofreader. My first job out of college was as a proofreader and, even after moving up to copy editor and onwards, typos, etc., still jump out at me. I could get on my soapbox about how publishers have cut back on in-house staff, so the current crop of freelancers doesn't have the opportunity to be trained by old-timers, as I was, but I'll just stop there!

65. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

Catherine the Great was a remarkable woman; indeed, she was a remarkable person. Born Sophia Augusta Fredericka, the daughter of a minor German prince and his teenage wife who never cared for her, but who hoped to fulfill her ambitions through her, she was taken to Russia at the age of 14 to marry Peter, the extremely peculiar and emotionally stunted nephew of the Empress Elizabeth (a daughter of Peter the Great), who was next in line to the Russian throne. Her job was to produce an heir to continue the Romanov line. Shunned by her husband (who flirted incessantly with her ladies in waiting but who may have had physical problems as well as emotional ones that interfered with sexual activity), she remained a virgin for seven years until pressure to produce the heir led her to take a lover.

During the the long years of unhappiness and torment while Elizabeth was empress, she read incessantly in both Russian (which she learned) and French, developing an interest in the Enlightenment writers and philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot), and became very well educated through her own efforts. In a phrase that charmed me, Massie writes, "Books were her refuge," something I have always thought about myself, and goes on to say that "She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket." She was not only well read and curious, but had great strength of will and determination; people enjoyed talking with her and became devoted supporters, as evidenced their encouragement and active participation in the overthrow (and subsequent death) of her husband when he briefly became emperor after the death of Elizabeth.

Catherine is perhaps most famous for her lovers, just as Cleopatra was perhaps most famous for hers, but she should be recognized for her array of accomplishments during her more than 30 years as empress. Not only did she negotiate the complex personal politics of her court and successfully put down a rebellion, but she opened up a southern route to the sea for Russia (by taking land, especially land providing access to the Black Sea and the mouths of rivers, from the Ottoman empire), built a southern naval fleet, and built up towns and villages in the Crimea and southern Russia generally; she tried but failed to improve life for the serfs; in collusion with first the Prussians and then the Austrians, she annexed a huge portion of Poland to Russia in three partitions; she became the premier art collector in Europe and created the collection that became the Hermitage; through her own example she demonstrated the safety and benefits of smallpox vaccinations, modernizing medicine, and built hospitals; and she brought western European philosophy and culture to Russia, among other accomplishments.

She was an autocrat, and believed in the monarchy, but also believed that autocracy should be enlightened and that the key to success was taking heed of what the public wanted. She is quoted by an aide to Potemkin as having said, "It's not as easy as you think. . . .I examine the circumstances. I take advice. I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effects my laws will have. And when I am already convinced in advance of good approval, then I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. That is the foundation of unlimited power. But believe me, they will not obey blindly when orders are not adapted to the opinion of the people." Nonetheless, "the people" were probably the nobility and the intelligentsia, not the millions of serfs; she was terrified by the French revolution because she could see what could (and did, about 125 years later) happen in Russia.

Massie introduces the readers to dozens of the people who were important in Catherine's life, from family and lovers to kings, courtiers, ministers, writers, and generals, and vividly depicts how she interacted with them, winning many to be devoted to her and some to oppose her. At the same time, he illustrates how much in her personal life was unhappy, starting with her relationship with her mother and with the Empress Elizabeth and continuing with her alienation from her own son and her heartbreak with some of of her lovers.

Although Massie had access to Catherine's memoirs (which did not cover her whole life) and other primary sources, I found he relied heavily on secondary sources, at least in his end-of-book selected bibliography and notes. I was captivated by the stories he told, but I did wonder how he knew what he knew. There was the same problem with lack of primary sources in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life, but she played fair and discussed her sources in the course of the book. I also thought the maps could have been better.

66. Germinal by Émile Zola

Germinal is the seventh month of the French revolutionary calendar, falling from late March to late April, when the world is starting to germinate. It is what the 50,000 people who followed Zola's funeral procession through Paris shouted. And it is the first novel by Zola I've read, but it will not be the last.

In Germinal, Zola vividly depicts the almost unbelievably harsh work of mining coal and the equally almost unbelievably harsh living conditions under which the miners and their families (who are often employed by the mine company themselves; women and children both work in the mines) live. The reader feels the biting cold and the biting hunger, the heat and danger in the mines, and much more. At the same time, Zola creates interesting characters who despite their shared suffering emerge as individuals. He engages the readers in the debates between what could probably be called Marxists, anarchists, and gradual socialists. Most importantly, perhaps, he has written an exciting, at times thrilling and scary, at times appalling and enraging, dramatic and at times almost melodramatic, story.

Briefly, the novel tells the story of how Etienne, a young man related to others in Zola's Rougon-Macqart series, with no money, no job, no food, and inadequate clothing comes upon the coal mines at Montsou, by chance gets a job, meets various people, ends up leading a strike, finds himself in a romantic triangle with violent undertones, and ultimately moves on. In some ways, the novel is the story of his growth as a human being. But in the course of this plot line, Zola paints an all-encompassing picture of life in a coal-mining town in the early 1860s, from the the mine and the miners, to the supervisors and bosses, to the bar owners and shopkeepers, to the local bourgeois, the hired mine manager, and an independent mine owner, as well as various political hangers-on including a revolutionary who has fled from Tsarist Russia. While the miners, and their plight as the labor that produces profits for the owners and stockholders without earning enough to live on themselves, are the focus of the novel, Zola doesn't demonize all the owners and business people; like the miners, they are characterized fully, with all their pluses and minuses.

Zola did a lot of research on mines, and it shows in the many scenes set deep down in Le Voreux, the voracious mine that swallows men, women, children, and horses every day (actually the horses live underground; as Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina, Zola gets inside the heads of the horses). It is scary to think of the many dangers that the miners faced, from water seepage to rock slides to bad air, among others, and the harrowing conditions under which they worked for minimal pay. The miners seem inured to their fate, as their parents and grandparents were, and as their children are, and their grandchildren will be, until a change in payment method and the encouragement of Etienne and others lead them to strike. Of course, the strike doesn't work, and the descriptions of their essential starvation are horrifying. But when, after some terrifying mob violence, with a violent official response, they go back, after six weeks, their troubles are far from over.

Another aspect of the story is the effects of everyone living so close together, and the rampant sexual activity, occasionally referred to as "like animals". According to something I read, this has not actually been documented in mining villages, but sexuality is very much part of the story: young (very young) women expect to be be taken advantage of by the young men and to have lots of children; some men are violent to the women and some exploit them; and some women take advantage of their sexuality for fun or profit. All of this is endlessly and often maliciously gossiped about. I believe Zola is trying to show that the the submissiveness of the women is somehow analogous to that of the workers, and that both result from their exploitation and that both could change with education and more autonomy for the workers. However, although Etienne is moving on at the novel, the miners themselves are stuck in their endless cycle of poverty and oppression.

I was interested in reading this book for several reasons. Not only had I never read Zola, but arubabookwoman recommended this book to me because I had read GB84 which deals with the 1984 British mining strike, and then I read in Ngugi's Globalectics that this novel "has affinities" with Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood, which is about an African railway strike. I found it not only fascinating for the world it depicted, but a terrific story.

As a final note, the edition I read had a very helpful introduction by the translator, Roger Pearson; although I found some of the British slang he used in the translation a little distracting, he discusses the difficulties of translating slang in a translator's note.

Great review of Germinal, Rebecca!

Rebecca, as always great reviews of both Escape from Camp 14 and Germnal. It's joy reading your reviews. I agree with you about reading more of Zola's works- I've read several of the Rougon-Macquart series of which Germinal is but one.

Also, I almost bought a copy of White Guard last week on my trip to Austin; but decided not to since it was 'his first novel." I figured it may not have been that good. But if I had read your review I'd definitely would've purchased it. Darn!

67. In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

Dix Steele (what a name!), a former flying ace in World War II, has come to Los Angeles to try his hand at writing, living on a monthly allowance provided by his stingy rich uncle. He manages to sublet an apartment from an old college friend, and then a chance encounter leads him to reconnect with his best army friend, Brub Nikolai, who is now a detective on the LA police force, and his attractive and perceptive wife Sylvia. Brub is part of a team investigating a series of rapes/stranglings of young women, which has set the city on edge. Later on, Dix seduces a sexy redhead who lives in his apartment complex. A cat and mouse game ensues. (I am trying not to give too much away.)

What I will say is that Dorothy Hughes sure knows how to keep a reader on the edge of her seat! In this unsettling psychological thriller, she gets inside the head of a deeply disturbed man who is what we now know as a serial killer. She is a master of subtly introducing new information, so that the reader gradually develops new ideas of what has happened and what is going on, and new understanding of the protagonist's delusions. I read this brief book in one sitting and could hardly put it down.

Thanks, Darryl, and thanks, xieouuang, for the compliments.

As usual Rebecca I am in thrall to your magnificent reviews. Fresh from lapping up your Massie review I read your review of Zola's Germinal - and hand on heart I have rarely read better.
I have read all of the Rougon-Macquart series and, if pushed, I would rate Germinal 2nd. La Bete Humaine, L'Assommoir and La Terre would be my other favourites.

Thanks, Paul. I'm interested that you've read all of the Rougon-Macquart, because many of them seem to be unavailable in English, or at least from Amazon. Did you read some of them in French? I don't think my French would be up to it. Also, do you recommend reading them in order, now that I've jumped in towards the end with Germinal? I do have L'Assomoir on order.

Rebecca, you can get translations of most of the series in ebook format at Project Gutenberg. if you have a kindle or a nook, or even a laptop, you can download them easily.

Alas, I don't have a kindle or a nook, and somehow reading on the laptop doesn't appeal. However, I'm off to check out Project Gutenberg . . .

OK, so I checked out The Fortune of the Rougons on Project Gutenberg since it's the first of the Rougon-Macqart series, and I saw that it's the original translation by Vizetelly, which I've learned, as I've been searching for translations, is vilified for its bowdlerization. I few others I've looked at are too, which makes sense as I guess these are in the public domain. Rather than read them in order, I may start by reading the ones that have been more recently translated and are available in book form, and then if I'm sufficiently hooked I may succumb to the bad translations.

Admit I haven't been able to face reading Germinal since I tried in high school for my French class and had to plead for an alternate 19th century novel as I found Zola unrelievedly bleak. (Hey, I was 15/16....) Ended up with Le rouge et le noir instead! (Still bleak, but...) I should get back to the Rougon-Macqart books. I suppose.

The essays sound intriguing, but I'm with you on the theory. Also, frankly, I wonder how much more there is to say about the master/bondsman relationship? Of course, the author probably has a unique POV, but it's far from a fresh idea, so the combination of poor proofing, excessive theories and somewhat predictable themes means I'll probably avoid.

I did like the Massie bio of Catherine, though I agree with you on secondary sources. I think I had noted that when I read it, but it was still trumped for my me by sheer readability. If there's a translation of Henri Troyat's bio of Catherine, you may want to hunt it down when you're in the mood -- it's just as readable and if I recall correctly relied more on primary sources. But then, Troyat was the scion of expat Russians in Paris, so that may explain it! I'm amazed, actually, that some of his historical novels were never translated into English.

It is bleak, Suzanne, but he's such a terrific writer. I was never able to get through The Red and the Black, but I keep meaning to try it again. Interesting about the Troyat bio; not sure I'm up for more Catherine though, with so many other books to read. As for the Ngugi, I got more out of his earlier essays, Something Torn and New, but I get the most out of his fiction. Thanks for stopping by.

>148 Chatterbox: Have you read any of Troyat's biographies of authors? I read Tolstoy and Checkov a long time ago and thought they were okay, but not great. I wonder if I would think differently now.

No, I've never read anything by Troyat, but I guess you were asking Suzanne!

Hijacking your thread. Sorry, Rebecca! I have (unread) Great Catherine by Carolly Erikson, but I'm not sure how good it is going to be. I may pick up the Massie instead.

And please don't give up on all your East European and Russian/Soviet reading as you are my main guide and inspiration! (I think your comment was on your other thread, but still.)

Rebecca - my french also wouldn't suffice either to read Zola in the vernacular. The most difficult I had to track down was the first in the series, but obscure or not all of them have been available in english at some stage.
Just as with Balzac's great book cycle it is not a series in the strictest sense and I personally don't think it makes any difference what order you read them in.

Suz - Balzac is probably more fun than Zola - don't know if you've read any of em but I think they carve out very interesting slices of french life in the immediate aftermath of the republic.

Lisa, not hijacking at all! Keeps things lively. I don't know anything about Great Catherine or Carolly Erikson so I have no basis for comparing them. And don't worry, I'm drawn to East/Central European and Russian/Soviet reading, so I'm not likely to give it up. Although, I'm being drawn in a different direction now . . .

Paul, thanks for the info that they don't have to be read in order. I was able to pick up the first, The Fortune of the Rougons, along with The Masterpiece, both in Oxford World Classic editions, at my favorite bookstore today, so I may be on a Zola kick. As for Balzac, where would you start with him?

Rebecca - again with Balzac I don't think it makes too much difference where you start. If I'm not mistaken the first one I read was The Black Sheep.

68. Silence by Shūsaku Endō

I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is an intense and penetrating look at the travails of a Catholic missionary in 17th century Japan, after Christianity has been outlawed and its believers subjected to torture, and a deep and thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of faith. It is also beautifully written, and provides a vivid portrait of Japan as seen through Portuguese eyes as written by a Japanese author.

On the other hand . . . I not only have difficulty comprehending this depth of faith but also, as a non-Christian, I have never been able to understand the extensive, if not extreme, proselytizing of Christianity, the need to convert as many others as possible to its beliefs. It seems patronizing to me: "we know what's best for you." These feelings colored my reading of the book because, while I was appalled by the Japanese methods of torture (although torture has certainly been practiced by those professing to be Christians too), I could understand why they wanted to keep such a foreign (and colonizing) religion out of their country. Nor do I understand the appeal of martyrdom. I also found a little peculiar the way the protagonist, Father Rodrigues, seems to compare his suffering to that of Jesus, and his betrayer to Judas. Perhaps this would not be disturbing to someone who is Christian, so perhaps this reflects a lack of understanding on my part, but it seems a little self-aggrandizing to me.

The overall question, of the silence of God, is more interesting. The 20th century, when this book was written, was a century of evil and suffering on a huge scale, and therefore this question is of even more import now than it was when Father Rodrigues traveled to Japan. Additionally, Endō, himself a devoted Catholic, alludes to the issue of how a western religion like Christianity can adapt itself to an eastern culture like that of Japan. Had he explored this more, I might have found more to like about the book.

As it is, I can only think that, throughout the centuries, not only have people of various religions persecuted and killed people of other religions but, as my grandfather liked to say, more wars have been fought over religion than for any other reason (not sure if this is strictly true). I wish I could say this book helped me understand faith more, but it left me just as puzzled.

69. The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

It is raining in a northern Iranian city, and the aging colonel hears that knock on the door in the middle of the night that never means anything good. So begins this complex and bleak novel that, with memories, nightmares, and ghosts, interweaves the story of the colonel and his five children with 20th century Iranian history and millennia of Persian literary tradition.

The colonel was in the Shah's army, but was kicked out either for his principled refusal to follow a particular order or for a personal crime, or both. He is an admirer of an earlier Iranian colonel, a hero to secular nationalists, referred to as The Colonel (with capital letters); a portrait of The Colonel hangs in the colonel's home, with photos of his dead children tucked into the frame. At the outset of the novel, which takes place during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the colonel's oldest son, Amir, released from imprisonment and torture as a revolutionary, is living in the basement, talking to nobody. He has mysterious visits from Khezr Javid, a secret policeman who conducted his "interrogations." The colonel's second son was killed as a revolutionary; his youngest son has just been killed in the war and thus is a "martyr." His older daughter is married to a man who bends with the wind, and the current wind is the Ayatollah; he tries to prevent his wife from visiting her father and brother. And his younger daughter, just 14, has vanished.

On the surface, the novel covers the few days in the colonel's life in which he discovers what has happened to his young daughter, attends the essentially state funeral of his youngest son and other "martyrs," and finally connects with Amir. But the surface, and the present, are only a thin veneer in the book. The reader travels back and forth in time, back and forth between the "real" and the memories, nightmares, and ghosts. It takes concentration to figure out what is happening, and when it is happening. Amir is as important in the colonel; while at times he appears "crazy," the reasons for his behavior gradually become clear.

And what of these memories? The colonel has political memories, of what happened under the Shah and before the Shah took power with US and British help, kicking out the democratic and nationalistic government under Mossadegh, as well as of the Islamic revolution under the Ayatollah in 1979. But he also has memories of his wife, and reflections on whether he raised his children right, given the toll of their involvement in revolutionary activity. Amir has nightmares of his experience in jail, the torture, his wife, the unanswered questions. At the same time, the author weaves in references to earlier Persian history and to Persian literature; the translator has provided invaluable explanatory notes, because otherwise these would go right by readers not well versed in Persian history and culture.

Ultimately, this is a very sad book, an elegy for a lost history of culture and freedom and a reflection on ideology and betrayal, love and loss, reality and the interior world. And it rains and rains and rains.

70. The Blackbirder by Dorothy B. Hughes

This wartime tale tells the story of Julie Guille, an escapee from Nazi-occupied Paris, as she flees ahead of the police, the FBI, and the Gestapo from New York to Chicago to Santa Fe in search of the mysterious Blackbirder, said to fly refugees into and out of the US, and in hopes of rescuing her beloved cousin, who she believes to be interned somewhere in Mexico. While the story might be a little outlandish, and while (as another LTer has written) this is not "in the same class" as Hughes' The Expendable Man and In a Lonely Place, Hughes is a fabulous writer and she kept me on the edge of my seat as Julie tried to figure out who was friend and who was foe and engaged in all sorts of resourceful exploits. Maybe a little of the story was predictable, but enough wasn't to keep me avidly reading. And in the end, it is a wartime story, published in 1943, and does its bit for the war effort, just as one of my all-time favorite movies, Casablanca, does -- but with a heroine instead of a hero. A very enjoyable read.

Tried to order The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri for my Kindle and our Wifi is out of commission. Rats!

Good luck, Tui, but you may get hooked like I did!

71. Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli

In this playful and perceptive novella, Tulli explores what it means to pluck a story out of life, how fiction and reality intersect, and how the past enters the present, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of telling a story that really represents life. She does this by creating the character of "the narrator," a man who has been hired by some mysterious person or organization to write a story. From the beginning, when the "narrator" tries to figure out who his characters are, he is out of his depth, as the "characters" go off and do things he doesn't necessarily want them to do, as more "characters" enter the "story," and as he finds his way through streets, buildings, stairways, elevators, and basements to try to both follow and constrain them. The time frame is fractured too, as the beginning of the novella seems to be in the present, but towards the end the "characters," including the "narrator," find themselves in wartime Poland, possibly during the Warsaw uprising.

In between, Tulli and the "narrator" meditate on language and grammar, on how they shape both the story and reality. For example, Tulli writes:

The narrator hopes that at this point he'll finally be able to put his foot on the dry land of the past tense, in the kingdom of certainty where facts live and flourish. Only there do they flourish, nowhere else: the past tense is their entire world, the homeland of truths that are incontrovertible though, it must be admitted, usually contradictory. p. 23

They (two of the "characters") would make some tea, and sit in the armchairs, teacups in hand, discussing the worrying suspicion that they would have to relinquish their polished floors and their phonograph and record collection, and they continually cast doubt on something that was blindingly obvious given the ineluctable way in which the future tense turns into the past. They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves they were safely beyond the reach of grammar. p. 95

This is the third of Tulli's books that I've read. All have been fascinating, all have been different. But, in all of them, Tulli writes beautiful, occasionally poetic prose and is an extremely detailed observer of the world around her, particularly of color and architecture, human activities and home furnishings. This was a delightful and thought-provoking read.

Intriguing review of Moving Parts, Rebecca. It sounds almost like an essay embedded in a novella, with a touch of poetry. I will have to look into Tulli's books. Your review of In Red makes me think that may be the place to start.

Linda, it may be that I overemphasized the grammatical over the fictional; Moving Parts doesn't read like an essay at all, because Tulli creates such a vivid fictional world. In Red, which I read first is definitely the most accessible of the books by Tulli I've read.

72. L'Assommoir by Émile Zola

This novel, the story of the rise and fall of Gervaise Coupeau, is so compelling I could barely put it down, even as there were times I wanted to slap Gervaise and ask her what on earth she was thinking and even though Zola can be didactic at times about his thesis that susceptibility to alcoholism is passed down from generation to generation and eventually inevitably leads to a downfall. Zola's goal with this book was to depict the people and the world of the new industrial working class living in slummy areas in what were then the suburbs of Paris.

We meet Gervaise when she has moved to Paris with Lantier, the father of her two children (one is Etienne in Germinal and the other is Claude of The Masterpiece); a laundress back in the provinces, she gets a job working in a laundry and it is there that she learns Lantier has left her for another woman, taking their meager possessions with him. Eventually, she succumbs to the pleadings of Coupeau, a roofer, to marry him, because she believes he is a hard-working, nondrininking man, who will help her achieve her goal of being able to "work, put food on your table, have a little place of your own, bring up your kids, and die in your own bed." (p. 42) Things go well at first: they have a daughter, Nana (who will have a book of her own) and save enough so Gervaise can achieve her goal of opening her own laundry (although, in the end, a harbinger of bad times to come, Gervaise has to borrow money from a sweet, but apparently slightly dimwitted, metalsmith, Goujet, who has a crush on her to be able to start the business). Again, things go well for a while, but then they don't. In the second half of the novel, we witness Gervaise's slow but inevitable slide into debt, self-indulgence, sloth, and ultimately drinking and despair, helped along the way by Coupeau, who spends his days and nights drinking, and by Lantier, who reappears, integrates himself into the neighborhood and their home, and who not only is always looking out for himself but also always does so at the expense of others.

This is just a broad outline of the plot. Zola peoples the novel and the neighborhood with dozens of other characters, many vividly drawn, others more walk-ons, and the neighborhood itself is equally a character in the novel. People live on top of each other, everyone knows everyone's business (or thinks they do), the sights and sounds and perhaps above all the smells are pervasive, and there are bars all over. Zola's genius is to relate all these people to each other and to reflect aspects of Gervaise's story in other subplots and characters. He also creates some dramatic set pieces in the Coupeau wedding party's trip to the Louvre, Gervaise's saint's day dinner, and a scene in an insane asylum. There is both depth and breadth in this novel; in some ways, Gervaise's rise and fall is reflected in the different places in which she lives, and her desire for cleanliness, depicted by her work and by her admiration of Goujet's mother's apartment, eventually succumbs to dirt and filth.

One other aspect of this novel, which created quite a stir when it was written, is that a great deal of it is written in working class French slang, some of it said to be arcane. This has has apparently been a challenge to translators; the translator of the Oxford World's Classics edition I read, Margaret Mauldon, has used working class British slang presumably from the same period. Most of this is understandable from the context. There are also lots of sexual double entendres, which also seems to have shocked the literary establishment.

Zola was criticized by both the right and the left for his portrayal of the working class: the right thought him a socialist, the left thought his depiction of the working class demeaning. His plan always was to make Germinal his novel about politics and the working class, and this novel was supposed to be their portrait. It is indeed a vivid one.

PS The picture on the cover of my edition shows a woman with dark hair; Zola makes it clear Gervaise was a blonde.

Recently, one of my f2f book groups read The Belly of Paris, also from this cycle of Zola works. It was my first experience reading Zola, and he was very graphic; the topic was food and the great food market that had been created in Paris.

I'm going to get that one too; I'm on a Zola kick right now.

I am devouring the first Camilleri! How many did you say there are?

Enjoying retracing Zola along with you Rebecca - it was definitely some of the most memorable reading from my 20s. You have certainly started with 2 of the very best. I would recommend "Earth" and "La Bete Humaine" too as the very best of the "series".

Going back to the discussion earlier this month (and, I am afraid, hijacking again...) I haven't read the Troyat bios of Russian authors; my sense is that he is a popular biographer rather than ultra-scholarly -- very readable, and authoritative and accurate, but not breaking radically new ground. I've read Pierre le Grand and his bio of Catherine. And some of his historical novels are fab, like Les dames de Siberie, about the aftermath of the Decembrists' revolt. As far as Carolly Erickson vs. Massie, Massie every day of the week!!

I may have to hunt down The Blackbirder; looks like it could be interesting as a contemporary novel of the times.

!67 Tui, there are 14 that have been translated into English, and several more that are yet to be translated. I have the person who posted just after you to thank for my mad dash through the Camilleris as it was Paul who made them sound so irresistible on his thread. Have fun! (And "devouring" is a great word for them, given Montalbano's love of food!)

#168 I will put those on my list, Paul, although I have several more that I've already bought and I want to read Nana too now that I've been introduced to her through L'Assommoir.

#169, Not hijacking at all, Suzanne. Les dames de Siberie sounds intriguing, although I don't see an English translation and, as I've commented on elsewhere, I doubt my French is still up to reading books in it. I think you will enjoy The Blackbirder, and possibly Hughes's other works too. (The other ones I've read are actually better.)

73. The Fortune of the Rougons by Émile Zola

As the first in Zola's 20-book Rougon-Macquart series, the role of this novel is to set the stage, to introduce the family, to explain the rationale, and to highlight the events that started the Second Empire. Zola has several goals in this series: to show the importance of heredity and its interaction with environment; to depict the particular characteristics of the successful, legitimate, Rougon side of the family and the unsuccessful, illegitimate Macquart side; and to illustrate the social system of the Second Empire.

I am glad I read Germinal and L'Assommoir before I read this book, because they show Zola at his best: the fully developed characters, the intimacy of their lives matched by the breadth of their world, the vivid details of the environment (be it coal mining or the slums), the satire, and the compelling story telling. While these can be found in places in this book, Zola gets a little bogged down in setting the stage for the whole series (lots of background information on the two main lines of the family) and goes a little overboard in showing the development of friendship and love between the teenagers Miette and Silvère, both of whom have had difficult childhoods. Additionally, Zola's view of heredity, as explained in this book, is seriously flawed by modern standards, although perhaps novel for its time.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book, which takes place over a week or so during the 1851 coup in which Napoleon's nephew took over the government in Paris fairly bloodlessly while republican resistance took place in the south and elsewhere. The teenagers get wrapped up in the resistance, while Silvère's uncle, Pierre Rougon, and his wife, scheme for greater power, even while fighting their continuing battle against Pierre's half-brother Antoine, one of the founders of the Macquart side of the family. The story of the scheming, and the satiric look at the reactionary cabal, are priceless. I appreciate the understanding I got of the structure of the family (helped by a family tree at the beginning of the edition I read), and I will definitely be reading more Zola.

#171: I started that one early this year but with school just was not able to devote the time to the book that I wanted to. I need to get back to it one of these days.

An obviously correct assessment on the Emile Zola cycle Rebecca. I also didn't start at the beginning with the series. I checked and mine started with La Bete Humaine and then Germinal and Nana. I do think I would have been less ecstatically enthused by it had I started at the beginning.

>171 rebeccanyc: Very nice review, Rebecca.

Thanks for stopping by, Stasia. As I noted in my review, I would definitely recommend reading a few other Zolas first to get your feet wet, especially Germinal.

Paul, I'm not planning on reading the whole cycle. I'm concentrating on books that are available in recent English translation, and I'm certainly mixing them up with other reading. You were the one who advised me I don't have to read them in order.

Thanks, Darryl.

#175: I believe it was thanks to you that I read Germinal, Rebecca. I thought it was terrific and gave it 5 stars.

The only Zola on my shelves is Therese Raquin, which I have because I saw the mini-series ages ago and enjoyed it. Just another of those authors I hope to get to one of these days----when people stop hooking me on Sicilian police procedurals with baby octopus sauce! *ahem*

Stasia, I only read Germinal a month or two ago, so it must have been someone else who recommended it to you. But I'm glad you liked it so much!

74. The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

As I was reading this book, I didn't quite know what to make of it, but now that I've been thinking about it I see it as a novel that shows us that everyone is human, even if we don't know how to look at them that way, and that those of us who are "different" -- whether through mental illness or something else -- still have human needs, feelings, and the desire to help others and give to society. Even the devil -- the buffalo-headed, cloven-hoofed scourge of the mental ward -- turns out to be just a man, and even a rat gets to tell his story.

The novel tells the tale of Pepper, a large white furniture mover, who is transported to the mental ward of a public hospital after getting into an altercation with three men who, unbeknownst to him, are undercover cops, a trio too lazy to arrest him with all the resulting paperwork, at the end of their shift. Supposedly there for a 72-hour observation period, he remains there apparently indefinitely once the meds kick in and the overworked and underpaid staff, most of whom are just glad to have a job in the iffy economy, do as little as necessary to keep the patients medicated and non-trouble-making. Early on, Pepper is visited by said devil, although he finds the other patients somewhat reluctant to discuss him. As various plots to rout the devil and/or escape develop, and as various mysterious events take place, Pepper gets to not only know his fellow patients, many of whom are vividly characterized, but to gain some long-missing insight into himself and compassion for others -- not, needless to say, through the efforts of the staff, but through the kindnesses and occasional nastiness of the patients.

Although I was a little unsure at the beginning whether I was going to like this book, I did eventually get into it and was fascinated by what was happening in this little community of the outcast from society. LaValle also brings in some apparently extraneous information -- the ethnic diversity of Queens, the oppressive stop-and-frisk policy of the NYC police, immigration policy, the life of Vincent Van Gogh, for example -- but it all gets worked into the story. Class and race play into it too, and the exhausting working conditions of the low-paid. The highlight for me was not the plotting but the development of the characters, many of whom I became quite fond of as their personalities shone through their "crazy" behavior.

I think those who expect this to be a horror novel will be disappointed; although some of the scenes with the devil are downright scary, this is more a novel about humanity than about monsters.

Excellent review of The Devil in Silver, Rebecca. I think you've captured the essence of it, and LaValle's intent when he wrote it. I'll listen to his interview on Fresh Air sometime next week.

Thanks, Darryl. It was your review that led me to buy and then read this book. Here's a link to a New York Times interview with LaValle, in the paper today, but apparently online last week.

75. Vlad by Carlos Fuentes

What would happen if Vlad the Impaler/Count Dracula moved to contemporary Mexico City? That's what Carlos Fuentes explores, with humor, horror, and graphic imagery in this novella, published in Spanish several years before his death this spring.

The only other Fuentes I've read is the massive, complex, and brilliant Terra Nostra, so I didn't know what to expect with this story. I think Fuentes must have had fun writing it, and I enjoyed the fact that the reader knows more than the narrator, an upper class lawyer, Yves Navarro, married to a real estate agent, who is entrusted by his aging and imperious boss to find a very specific kind of home for his old school pal, Vlad. The Navarros have a young daughter, but are suffering because their son died in a swimming accident. Fuentes lays on Navarro's obtuseness a little thick, and both Navarro's paeans to his sex life (and his lengthy breakfasts) with his wife and some of the more gory and graphic details later on in the novella didn't work too well for me. And, having reached the end, I really wonder a lot about Navarro's attitude at the beginning, when he refers to his "awful adventure." A little too cavalier?

I think I'll pass on this one. I don't do well with "gory and graphic".

Thanks, Rebecca. I saw that article in the print edition of the NYT, and I'll probably read it tomorrow.

Nice review of Vlad; I'll pass on it, though.

Your thread seems to have slipped through my net for a while Rebecca. I have added Memoirs of a Revolutionary to my library due to your and two other recommendations recently, ditto White Guard, and as I have said in another Group, I bought a quartet go Magdalena Tulli on your recommendation, and am really enjoying Moving Parts, which I expect to finish today.

I am now going to add Ashes and Diamonds as I am interested in knowing more history and literature of Poland.

Thanks for stopping by, Caroline. In addition to Tulli and Ashes and Diamonds, I have several other Polish works on my TBR. I'll be interested in learning what you're reading.

#178: OK. I am not sure who recommended it to me then. Oh well, I guess in the end it really does not matter.

76. Deep River by Shūsako Endō

Like Silence by the same author, this novel explores religious belief, this time taking a group of more or less contemporary Japanese men and women on a trip to the Ganges where, for varying reasons, they hope to fill some of the holes and resolve the darkness they feel in their lives. Interestingly, the title comes from an African-American spiritual which Endō uses as an epigram for the book.

Much of the novel focuses on Christianity, and it is filled with what I take to be Christian imagery and Christ figures (in the sense of dying for others), but Endō definitely explores, in this later work, the question of how a western religion like Christianity can or cannot be adapted to an eastern Asian sensibility. There is a lot about Hindu gods (and especially goddesses) and how they incorporate both good and evil, and about mother figures and how Hindu goddesses who are mother figures, especially one known as Chamunda, exemplify giving despite unspeakable suffering in a way that Mary, in Christianity, does not. A recurring character, not one of the travelers, is a Japanese man who traveled to Europe to become a Christian priest, was rejected because he had too many (Asian) ideas which were troubling to his superiors, and ends up, still a Christian in his mind, living near the banks of the Ganges and helping dying people reach it; in this work, he explicitly compares himself to Jesus, who in this book is noted primarily for taking on the suffering of others. Poverty and class also play a role.

I had a little difficulty getting into this book, as I found some of the initial portraits of the Japanese travelers a little schematic, and it was clear that each of the main characters would be changed in some way by the trip, although not necessarily in the way he or she expected. As I read more, I realized this was not so much a book about the characters but a book about different approaches to life, suffering, and death. The Ganges is, both literally and symbolically, the embodiment of both life and death As Endō writes:

The river took in his cry and silently flowed away. But he felt a power of some kind in that silvery silence. Just as the river had embraced the deaths of countless people over the centuries and carried them into the next world, so too it picked up and carried away the cry of life from this man sitting on a rock on its bank. p. 189

In the end, I found the novel thought-provoking, although I'm not sure exactly what Endō hoped readers would take away from it.

Excellent review of Deep River, Rebecca. I'm reading Endo's books roughly in order, and this one is the most recently published one that I own, so I'll probably read it in December.

Excellent review of Deep River, Rebecca. I would like to read something by Endo and need to make a request through ILL, as I have not found any of his works in area bookstores.

Thanks, Linda. Of the three Endos that I've read, Linda, I was most impressed by the first, The Sea and Poison, and I thought Silence was a better book than Deep River, even though I had mixed feelings about it. Like Darryl, I'm reading them for the Author Theme Reads group's year-long focus on Endo, with other Japanese authors featured each quarter. You might pop over there to get some insight into his other novels. I've just ordered Scandal for my next Endo.

Rebecca, did I mention that I bought most of the books I own by Endo at the Strand? Most of the ones I bought were new paperbacks, which cost around $5-7 each.

77. Nana by Émile Zola

Who is Nana? Is she a daughter of the working class Parisian slums who rose to fame and fortune by selling her body and using her wiles? Is she a woman who exploited and was exploited by men? Is she a woman who sought happiness and never really knew how to find it? Is she a symbol of the excesses of greed and financial and sexual exhibitionism of the Second Empire? In fact, she is all of these.

I was interested in reading Nana after meeting her as the willful and wayward daughter of Gervaise and Coupeau in L'Assommoir -- and because it may well be Zola's most read novel. Shocking in its sexual frankness at the time it was written, much of it is still shocking today, not in the lack of the kind of graphic descriptions we now regularly read, but in the overtness and ubiquity of the search for and payment for sex.

At the beginning of the novel, Nana is appearing on the stage of a somewhat down-at-the-heels theater that is presenting an operetta loosely based on the amorous intrigues of the Greek gods. Despite her lack of singing or acting talent, she is an immediate success because her extremely shapely body is displayed leaving very little to the imagination and because she has a real but undefinable presence. Soon, men of means and noble status are chasing her and eager to pay her bills. As the novel progresses, the reader follows the ups and downs of Nana's career as a kept woman, her search for love, her search for money, and her search for fame. Her many lovers are introduced, as are the women in the theatrical and kept woman circuits, and even some "respectable" women.

Zola is at the peak of his abilities in this novel, not only vividly depicting the world of the theater and the varied characters, but also creating such completely believable set pieces as an aristocratic party, a party of the theater/demimonde set, high society horse races, life in country houses, and a lesbian bar/restaurant. His descriptions of the finances and decor of Nana's various homes, including an incredibly ostentatious bed that is made for her, her obsessions with various lovers, and the intrigues she's involved in all are compelling. There is much more to this book too, as it examines the theater, street prostitution, the influence of the Catholic church, and the corruptibility of even the "respectable" woman. Yet . . . Zola can pile it on so thick that some of it just doesn't seem believable. And that's why I think he wrote it partly as a metaphor for the decadence and corruption of the Second Empire, an empire that, as the novel ends, is on its way to falling after defeat in the looming Franco-Prussian war.

Finally, from the perspective of the 21st century and feminism, it is easy to look at the lives of kept women such as Nana as artifacts of the past. And yet, men of power and money still seek out attractive and showy woman, still spend their money to demonstrate how much they have, still buy and furnish huge homes, and so on. Plus ça change . . .

Gosh, it has been SO long since I read that... You've made me want to reread it as I'm sure it was wasted on my younger self.

Thanks for the review of Deep River, Rebecca. I have only read Endo's Silence, which I loved. I will have to see if I can get my hands on a copy of Deep River too.

Tui, it could well be one of those books that seem really different when you read them as an older adult (Anna Karenina was one of those for me).

Thanks for stopping by, Stasia, and I think you would enjoy Deep River although it is not as well written a book as Silence.

78. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This book grew on me as I came to see the richness of the world Dangarembga has created. Much more than a coming-of-age story (although it is one), much more than a wonderful evocation of a time and a place (although it is), this novel illuminates the conflicts of colonialism and feminism: the desire for (English) education versus loyalty to one's village, family, and culture; the struggle for autonomy while remaining connected to people who don't understand; issues of (relative) wealth and poverty; issues of women's roles and patriarchy; issues of Christianity versus the local religion; issues of English versus Shona. Despite these weighty topics, the closest Nervous Conditions comes to being a polemic is in Dangarembga's choice of epigraph: "The condition of native is a nervous condition," from Franz Fanon. It is above all an absorbing novel with compelling characters.

Tambu, short for Tambudzai, is about 14, living with her family in an impoverished Rhodesian (not yet Zimbabwean) village; she is the narrator, but she is clearly telling the story from a more advanced age. Her uncle, the head of the extended family, who has studied in England and is the headmaster of the nearby mission school, has taken his nephew, Tambu's brother, to study there. Tambu longs for an education herself, and dislikes the way her brother has adopted "English" ways and turns his nose up at the village. When her brother dies, she talks her way into going to the mission school herself (despite the family being unsure whether education is necessary, or appropriate, for a girl), and goes to live in her uncle's home. There, she rebuilds her friendship with her cousin Nyasha, a brilliant but troubled girl who can't find her place in the world after having lived in England while her parents were studying there.

Much of the novel involves the interaction of Tambu with Nyasha and her family, and with her own extended family back in the village. The reader sees the sloth of Tambu's father, the sorrow of Tambu's mother, the uncle's power as the relatively wealthy head of the family and the family's traditional devotion to him, the unexpressed frustration of Tambu's aunt, just as educated as her uncle, but subservient to him, the evolving strength of another aunt (her mother's sister, who first appears to be just a pleasure seeker), and much more, as Dangarembga creates complex distinct characters and as Tambu constantly thinks about her actions and reactions, as well as those of others.

Despite the fact that this novel takes place during the late 1960s and into 1970, when the white residents of Rhodesia, under the leadership of Ian Smith, declared their independence from England, leading to a brutal civil war, there are no signs of war in this novel. The white people in it are largely missionaries, and so are though of as "holy" but nonetheless foreign and strange. They can also be extremely condescending and racist without realizing it, as when Tambu is accepted into a prestigious convent school and has to sleep in a crowded room with five other African students (even though the white students sleep four to a room) because, as the nun says proudly, they have so many African students this year.

This book has been on my TBR for a while; I'm happy I finally read it and have already ordered another novel by Dangarembga.

79. The Old Man and the Medal by Ferdinand Oyono

I bought this book because I thought Oyono's Houseboy was a powerful depiction of the evils of colonialism and I was eager to read more by him. Although I enjoyed this brief intensely satirical novel, I didn't feel it had the force of the later work. Meka, the old man of the title is, for no apparent reason except that he "gave" his ancestral land to the local church and had two of his sons killed in the French army during World War II, told that he is to receive a medal from the chief white man in Cameroon. At first he is quite proud of this, and his fellow villagers and relatives from nearby villages converge on his home for the expected celebration. Although he does receive the medal, and hears a lot of hypocritical talk from the French colonialists, subsequent events change his mind about "the whites." Oyono paints a vivid picture of village community life and customs, perhaps poking fun at them a little, of various characters including Meka's wife and her brother and sister-in-law, and of the completely separate world of the whites. One of my favorite scenes was when an interpreter, who is translating an interchange between Meka and the French police chief, tells Meka, while the police chief thinks he is translating, "don't annoy the white man. You can think what you like about him when you are out of here . . .Don't do anything stupid! Your case has been all fixed up."

just marking a place...

Dan, I also have a Club Read thread; I saw you asking about that somewhere else.

80. Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

I was eager to read this book of short stories after reading an interview with Claire Vaye Watkins in the New York Times, because I enjoy stories taking place in the vastness of the western United States. Yet I came away from reading this book with very mixed feelings.

Without a doubt, Watkins creates a vivid sense of place, largely in the deserts of Nevada (one motto for Nevada is the Battle Born State), but also in remote areas of California, and of characters. The landscapes are open and bare and bleak, and the people are lonely by choice and by circumstances, and are often coping with losses in their own idiosyncratic ways. All well and good. But, for me, the stories were marred by my awareness of the scaffolding Watkins had created for them, and by her efforts sometimes to be too clever. And the reader doesn't have to struggle to see what interests Watkins: sisters and near-sisters, that the past informs the present (surprise!), and loss of parents and of love.

To give some examples, a lot of the stories have a kind of framing device where the reader sees the protagonist in the present and then learns a story from the past. I think the stories, for example one in which a 30-ish woman ends up telling her boyfriend a sordid tale from her teenage years, would have been stronger without this framing. I think readers understand that more or less everything we do influences who we become later on. Similarly, the strongest story in the book, a long tale about two brothers during the California gold rush, would have been stronger without the epilogue in which one of the brothers relates what happened to him afterwards.

Watkins also uses techniques that didn't necessarily work for me. The first story in the book (which fictionalizes her history as the daughter of a man who was one of Charlie Manson's associates who testified against him and apparently wasn't involved in the murders) is a good example. For several pages, Watkins explores different ways the story "could" start, laying out a lot of the history of the west, and then gets into the main story. I get it that she wanted to locate the Manson story and its personal impact in a larger landscape and time frame, but this seemed gimmicky to me. And there are other gimmicks in other stories that I also found annoying, calling one protagonist "our girl" instead of a name, having one protagonist create imaginary museum exhibits of her life, having one protagonist, perhaps more self-aware than most, saying "These are my friends. These are the funny, ironic things we do so we can be the kind of funny, ironic people who do them." Then there's the guy who keeps peacocks named after the counties of Nevada, and the young woman who introduces Dumbo the Elephant into the story.

And yet, there's a lot to like in these stories, and some of them show a lot of promise, mostly when Watkins can stick to the story and not feel she has to show the reader what she's doing. She is a good writer, especially about the bleakness of the landscape and of people's lives, as when she writes: "Out here a person could get turned around and lose his own trail, each stretch of nothing looking like the next, east looking like south looking like west, not knowing where he came on the lake bed, and not knowing how to get home." I'll look at what she does next.

#200 - found it. Somehow mistakenly "ignored" your thread. That has been fixed.

Rebecca - Just de-lurking to thank you for a very thoughtful review of Battleborn. You articulated exactly my problems with it, as well as my hope for Watkins as someone to watch.

The review of Nana was very helpful, Rebecca. Thanks and a thumb from me.

Katie, thanks for stopping by. Just read your review, and I can see we're on the same page about Battleborn!

Joe, thanks! Glad it was helpful and curious about what you found helpful.

#196: Unfortunately for me, Silence is the only book of Endo's that my local library has.

I don't think that's unfortunate, Stasia; I think it's a better book and you will like it better.

81. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

I've been immersed in this history of the French Revolution, and the period immediately leading up to it, for nearly two months, 875 pages of dense, albeit readable and often witty, prose, enlivened by many contemporary illustrations. Schama announces in his preface that he is taking a revisionist approach to the history, and that he is reverting to a 19th century style and writing it as a narrative. I am not sufficiently versed in the history of 18th century France (actually, I'm not versed in it at all) to evaluate his analysis, except to say that it seems to make sense as he tells it, but I definitely appreciated the chronological (as opposed to thematic) organization, even though I sometimes completely lost track of who people were, as Schama brings in dozens, if not hundreds, of secondary characters. In the end, although I enjoyed and learned a lot from the book, I often felt as though there were lots and lots of trees and it was hard to see the forest.

So what is Schama's revisionist approach? It takes a variety of forms. He argues that the prerevolutionary period, far from being only a deadening morass of ancient customs, was actually a time of great change. spurred by news of the American revolution, enlightenment philosophy, the writings of Rousseau, scientific exploration and experimentation (including, dramatically, hot air balloons), early steps towards manufacturing and industrialization (which upset the guild system), and more frequent and rapid transportation of goods around France. Often nobles, more than the bourgeoisie or the peasants, were the ones behind these advances (after all, they had the time and the money). He also argues that "a patriotic culture of citizenship was created in the decades after the Seven Years' War, and that it was thus a cause rather than a product of the French Revolution." In fact, he spends so long on the prerevolutionary period that it takes him 368 pages to reach the storming of the Bastille.

Schama believes that violence was built into the revolution from the beginning, that "it was not merely an unfortunate by-product of politics, or the disagreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished, or vicious ones were thwarted. In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the revolution itself." Some examples: the "September massacres" of some 1400 Parisian political prisoners, the brutal repression of the brutal uprising in the Vendée and elsewhere, and later, during the Terror, with perhaps one-third of the population killed in certain regions, and with some of the revolutionary military leaders coming up with ideas (unused) that were "sinister anticipations of the technological killings of the 20th century."

Another of Schama's ideas is "the problematic relationship between patriotism and liberty, which, in the Revolution, turns into a brutal competition between the power of the state and the effervescence of politics." Indeed, the chaos of the Estates General and its successors soon turns into absolutism and the need to exterminate enemies. "Revolutionary democracy would be guillotined in the name of revolutionary government." The analogy with the Russian revolution is obvious.

Economically speaking, the Revolution didn't really help the peasants or the poor in the cities, and the revolutionary government still had to deal with bread prices; indeed, in some ways the revolutionary years were harder on the poor than the prior old regime. Schama also makes a convincing argument that "the "bourgeoisie" which Marxist history long believed to be the essential beneficiary of the Revolution was, in fact, its principal victim" because of the attacks during the Terror on mercantile and industrial enterprises in port towns on the Atlantic and Mediterranean and in textile centers in northeastern France.

Perhaps most importantly for the way he tells the history, Schama argues for the importance of individual actions as opposed to theories of the inevitable progress of history. As he writes in the preface, "Nor does the Revolution seem any longer to conform to a grand historical design, preordained by inexorable forces of social change. Instead it seem a thing of contingencies and unforeseen consequences . . . For as the imperatives of "structure" have weakened, those of individual agency, and especially of revolutionary utterance, have become correspondingly more important." Throughout the book, Schama uses quotes from people involved in the actions to illustrate what they were thinking.

I only knew the broad outlines of the revolution before reading this book, and became interested in reading it after I read Hilary Mantel's novel about Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Danton, A Place of Greater Safety, several years ago. So there was much I didn't know anything about, much I learned that was quite fascinating (the origins of the Marseillaise, for example), and much I learned that was quite depressing, especially when Schama focused on the widespread and obsessive violence.

This is such a complex book that I really can only touch on some on the major themes. Schama weaves together a vast number of contemporary sources: philosophical musings, letter-writers, records of speeches, newspaper articles (the revolutionaries were prolific writers), diaries, and more, in a remarkably impressive way. The illustrations of contemporary artists and political cartoonists add immeasurably to the book. Finally, Schama also has a wonderful way with words.

82. The Kill by Émile Zola

The kill, the title of this second novel of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, refers to the spoils of hunting that are given to the dogs both to reward them and to spur them on to greater efforts. It is a chillingly appropriate image of the chase after wealth and sexual pleasure ("gold and flesh") that rules the lives of the characters in this horrifying work. It takes place as Paris is being transformed through the efforts of Baron Haussmann into the Paris we know today, with broad boulevards replacing rabbit warrens of back streets, in an effort not just to "beautify" but also to eliminate good locations for barricades and to provide routes the police and army could follow to put down rebellions. Then as now, such "urban renewal" involves uprooting the poor and creating ample opportunities for real estate speculation.

Zola tells the tale of speculator par excellence Saccard (formerly Rougon) and his love for scheming, corruption, and prostitutes; his sister Sidonie who profits from other people's secrets and troubles; his second wife Renée who, despite constant purchases of dresses that almost completely display her breasts and life in a mansion decorated to excess, is sufficiently bored to slip into a completely inappropriate sexual relationship; and his son Maxime, devoted only to pleasure, sly and corrupt. It is difficult for the reader to decide which of these characters is most despicable. Their lives are frenetic; Zola describes doors constantly opening and closing, people constantly coming and going, husband and wife and stepson living their own lives while living in the same house. Even as they live in luxury -- and the decor of each of the rooms of the house, and especially the plant-filled hot house are described in infinite, and at times stifling, sensual detail -- both husband and wife owe lots of money, and Saccard, especially, is constantly scheming how to juggle the real money and the money that only exists on paper.

As in his other novels I've read, Zola is a perceptive observer of character and place, and includes a wonderful set piece of a costume ball held in the Saccards' mansion. The deception of the costumes mirror the deceptions of speculative finance, official corruption, sexuality, and adultery that fill the novel. He peoples the ball, and the book, with a variety of vivid secondary characters who, in combination, depict the excesses and corruption of the Second Empire. All in all, he is a consummate story-teller, and I could barely put this book down as I waited for the inevitable train wreck.

The Schama sounds interesting, he has a way of making history accessible for me. And I should read more Zola as I've only read Therese Raquin.

I have owned Citizens forever, but never read it. Do you think it would be helpful if I read a non-revisionist history before this? All I know of the revolution comes from Hugo.

BTW, your link to The Kill goes to the wrong work. The book sounds so grim, but then I could barely put this book down as I waited for the inevitable train wreck sold me. :-)

Thanks, Laura and Lisa, for stopping by. Lisa, I think it would be fine to read the Schama first. As far as I can tell what he means by revisionist is that he is focusing on the importance of people and their actions rather than social constraints like the price of bread. And of course also the issues I mentioned in my review. I haven't read anything else on the French Revolution other than fiction (A Place of Greater Safety and of course A Tale of Two Cities a million years ago), so I don't have anything to compare it to but it is very readable and L-O-N-G!

I've fixed the link to The Kill. It's interesting, because of course the setting isn't grim the way the settings for Germinal and L'assommoir are, but the people are all so unpleasant, since all they care about is money and sex; there isn't an ounce of love or loyalty or generosity among them.

I have had the Schama book in the BlackHole for a good long while. Maybe on my next school break I will actually get it read.

Stasia, it is a L-O-N-G read, even for a speedy reader like you. You might want to wait until you're finished with school, so that you can enjoy a variety of books on your break!

I've started a new thread.