Rebeccanyc's 2013 Reading, Part 1

To make this first post more interesting, I'm copying my list of my favorite reads of 2012. Lists are not in any particular order.

Fiction

The Best of the Best: Contemporary
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle
Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
GB84 by David Peace
Red Sorghum by Mo Yan

The Best of the Best: Classics
The Monk by M. G. Lewis
Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth
Germinal, L'Assommoir, The Kill and Nana by Emile Zola
The Expendable Man and In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes
White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Cornish Trilogy and The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Fiction: Most Fun Reads (some overlap with other categories)
Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth
The Monk by M. G. Lewis
13 Inspector Montalbano mysteries by Andrea Camilleri
World War Z by Max Brooks

Fiction: The Best of the Rest
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Big Machine by Victor Lavalle
Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli
The Birthday Boys, Master Georgie, and Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge
13 Inspector Montalbano mysteries by Andrea Camilleri
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis
Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrejewski
The Ermine of Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori

Nonfiction

Nonfiction: The Best of the Best
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Nonfiction: The Best or the Rest
The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes
Iron Curtain by Anne Alexander
The Story of America and The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson

Still More Categories

Disappointments
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Vlad by Carlos Fuentes
The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa

Duds
How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish
The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan
Vesuvius by Gillian Darley

And, finally, if I had to pick just five . . .well, make that six (but this is just how I feel at this moment!)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge
Germinal by Emile Zola
The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes
White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Starred!

+1

Happy new year Rebecca!

Hi Rebecca,

I read your wonderful reviews all last year and you are responsible for many of my TBR's for this coming year. You also keep popping up on my "books in common" links so I figured that I finally ought to introduce myself! I've got your new thread starred. - Peg (a fellow NYC'er).

Thanks for stopping by, Samantha, Monica, Cushla, and Peg -- and welcome, Peg! I will eventually do something more creative with my first post!

Rebecca, I'm more of a lurker on your threads but really enjoy your reviews and the book discussions they generate. Starred again.

Welcome back!

Shall we agree on mutual lurking this year?? :-)

Have a happy book-filled 2013!!

Enjoyed following both your threads last year, will do so again. Happy New Year and new thread.

Thanks all! Suzanne, I can't keep up with your thread (!), but I skim it for interesting books. You're welcome to lurk here!

I am glad to see you back again, Rebecca! Happy New Year!

Following you again Rebecca!

Another mostly-lurker here... :)
Your threads do tend to increase my wishlist. Hopefully I can chat more than lurk this year, we'll see.

I read more than I post, Rebecca! I'll end the year with a measly 10 threads, a fraction of what the superstar posters deliver...

Rebecca and Suz - you are both Superstars! It is quality not quantity that counts. As someone more familiar with the latter to someone preoccupied with the former - Happy New Year!

Yup, I'll be following you too. I seem to remember getting hit by some books I *had* to read from you before.

Happy New Year, Rebecca!

Thanks, everyone, especially you lurkers. And happy new year to all!

And Suzanne, I only got up to three threads last year, because I'm not nearly as chatty as some people I could mention! (Thanks, Paul!) So while I know what you mean about reading more than you post, you have me beat in that league too -- by hundreds of books! Just keeping up with your reading is a (pleasurable) task.

Delurking to say I admire your book choices and reviews. I'm not very chatty either so I guess I'll go back in lurk mode, but I will make an effort to post occasionally. Happy New Year!

Cheers!

I'll thank you in advance for all the books I will add to my wishlist in 2013 thanks to your reviews!

Stopping by to star you so I can keep track of how life is treating you. Hope the New Year is starting out to be a good one.

Yet another lurker here. Hi, Rebecca - glad to see you back!

It's fun to see all you lurkers here; never knew there were so many of you!

Another lurker checking in...

Not a lurker as such Rebecca but wishing you a mightily pleasant and book filled weekend.

I'm not lurking, I'm just late! Really looking forward to another year of following your most excellent reviews and reading, Rebecca.

My first book of 2013!

1. Pot Luck by Émile Zola

The English title of this book doesn't really reflect the seething activity taking place in it; a more literal translation of something like "boiling pot" would have been better. In this novel, Zola tackles the hypocrisy of bourgeois life by focusing on the residents of a single, recently built apartment building.

The story starts when Octave Mouret, related to both the Rougons and Macquarts in a complicated way (explained by the genealogical chart on this Wikipedia page)), comes to Paris to seek his fortune, and through an acquaintance from his home town of Plassans, movies into the apartment building on the Rue de Choiseul and finds a job as the head assistant at a large draper's shop run by the Hedouins. Octave is impressed by the modernity of the building, with a grand heated stairway (at least partway up the building for the tenants, only an unheated back stairway for the servants); the acquaintance, an architect named Campardon, assures him there is water and gas on every floor, although he also points out cracks in the paneling and peeling paint. He insists (as many other will insist throughout the book) that this is a "respectable" building. He tells Octave: "The only thing, my boy, is that there must be no noise and above all no women. My word! If you brought a woman here, there would be a revolution in the house." Then, after Campardon introduces Octave to his family and takes him to his new place of employment, Octave overhears him talking very familiarly with Gasparine, a supposedly estranged cousin of Madame Campardon who also works at the Hedouins. In subsequent chapters, the reader encounters the Josserand family (father, mother, two daughters who the mother is desperately trying to marry off), other tenants in the building and, very importantly, many of the servants who work for the tenants, living in tiny rooms at the top of the building and sharing news and gossip with each other by yelling out of their courtyard-facing kitchens. While Octave and the Josserats (and the family of the landlord) are at the center of a lot what happens in this novel, it is almost the building that is the main character, with the varied tenants acting as an ensemble cast.

And what happens is a lot of intrigue, both sexual and financial, among the tenants, between the tenants and the servants, between the tenants and outsiders, and between outsiders and other outsiders. "Respectable" men decry "slutty" servants one minute and visit their mistresses the next. Across the board, the contempt most of the men have for most women is spectacular. Although there are horrifying moments (including one, towards the end, that is a tour de force of Zola's naturalistic style), this is largely a satirical work, with Zola showing the dirt (sometimes literally) that lies under the veneer of bourgeois "respectability." He also manages to poke a little fun at the church, as represented by the local priest who does the bidding of his bourgeois parishioners, and to allow a few characters, including the local doctor, to express anti-Empire sentiments. The servants, who are treated terribly by their employers, of course know everything that goes on in the building and are eager to share their thoughts on their employers with each other; thus, Zola brings class issues into the mix.

As always, Zola's varied characters jump of the page, the suspense builds through his expert story-telling, and the set pieces at parties satirize pretensions while advancing the plot. While this is not my favorite of the Rougon-Macquart novels I've read so far, I couldn't put it down.

Great review! I'll have to keep that one in mind, but I need to read my copy of Germinal first.

That sounds like a fascinating book, Rebecca. I don't think I've ever read any Zola — is there a particular book I should start with?

Rebecca, your review makess me want to continue reading more of Zola. I've read only a handful of the Rougon series.

Rosalita, I would start with Germinal. It's the one I started with (i.e., the one that got me hooked), and it's still my favorite.

And thanks, Tanglewood, and Manuel. After reading a few out of sequence, I'm reading the Rougon-Macquart series in Zola's recommended order, but only the ones that are in modern translation, since the original English translations were notoriously bowdlerized. Also, the Author Theme Reads group is focusing on French authors this year, and Zola is the year-long author (there are other quarterly authors).

Even before I read Pot Luck, whenever I read its French name (which I don't speak), I thought of it as "Pot Boiler." That's the name by which it goes in my mind. :) Great review! I agree with you that Pot Boiler is probably a mid-rank Zola.

I just finished The Ladies Paradise as my first book of the year. One of the main characters is Octave Mouret, and as the apartment building itself in Pot Luck was a character in and of itself, the inner workings of the department store in The Ladies Paradise were the most interesting part of the book to me. I hope to be posting my review soon. I also hope to post on the Author Theme Group my thoughts on the Zolas I've read so far.

I'd recommend Germinal and I also like L'Assommoir (though it's a bit depressing and Nana. I read The Ladies' Paradise after hearing a serialisation on the radio here, and it was worth reading though I think the radio adaptation brought its best bits out very well - and it's just been adapted for TV here though they set it in a northern English town rather than in Paris as in the novel.

I read Nervous Conditions soon after it was published, and then 2 or 3 years ago found a sequel in the library, so reread it in preparation for the other one - they were published 20 years apart - I found an interview with the writer online - she's also trying to make a living by all kinds of writing and other creative projects (theatre and film I think). The Book of Not is also worth a read though I found it quite sad.

Thank you, Rebecca and elkiedee, for the Zola recommendations.

I loved Germinal! You're making me want to run out and read more Zola.

One of these days I will return to Zola - but not today.

I agree with Rebecca's recommendation to start with Germinal- not only because it's the first in the series but also it's a good introduction to Zola's style. Although the novel is pretty dark (too much time in the mines?)

#34 Deborah, I'm looking forward to reading The Ladies Paradise, especially now that I've "met" Octave Mouret. It will be the next one for me (because of the order I'm reading them in), but I'll be mixing in some other books before I get back to Zola.

#35 Elkidee, I loved L'Assommoir too, and also Nana (who of course is a child in L'Assommoir), and I also liked The Kill a lot. I also read The Book of Not last year after I read Nervous Conditions; I thought it was compelling, but I didn't think it was as complex and nuanced as Nervous Conditions. It did give an excellent portrayal (also shown in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's most recent memoir, In the House of the Interpreter) of life in an African boarding school during a war for liberation from colonialism; unlike the school in The Book of Not, Ngugi's school was entirely African.

#37, 38 Thanks for stopping by, CammyKitty and Stasia!

#39, Manuel, I don't think Germinal is the first in the series. According to this Wikipedia page, it was the 13th Zola wrote and the 16th in his recommended reading order. However, I would still recommend reading it first.

Fabulous review of Pot Luck, Rebecca. The link in your review goes to a book by Mable Hoffman, though.

I'll definitely read Germinal, but I probably won't read anything else by Zola in 2013. Too many books...

Fixed! Thanks, Darryl.

I read La Bete Humaine first and it sucked me in to the extent that I have read as many of them as I can and not been terribly disappointed by any of them.
The Fortune of the Rougons is of course the first in the series and almost always acknowledged as one of the weakest of the lot. If I was recommending a place to start perhaps it would be La Terre with its memorable opening scenes showing off Zola at his supreme best but in truth anywhere is fine except the beginning!

On a better translation for Pot Luck (which I agree is not really quite "it") what about "The Melting Pot"?

Have a lovely weekend Rebecca.

With all this Rougon-Macquart-talk, I'm thinking of reading the series too. Your excellent reviews (also on the Author Theme Reads group) are very tempting.

Thanks for stopping by, Paul. "The Melting Pot" has other connotations in the US, where the term was used to suggest that all the immigrants from around the world would be "melted" together into Americans. So it wouldn't work here for Pot-Bouille, and I like the sense of "boiling" for the book anyway. Looking forward to La Bete Humaine and La Terre when I get to them.

2. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

What a delight it is to read a biography that is impeccably researched yet rolls off the pages like a novel, that tells the story of a fascinating yet little known person and situates it so lightly yet fully in the tumultuous time in which he lived. The Black Count is Alex Dumas (father of the novelist), né Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pallertrie, the son of a white French slave owner in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and an enslaved black woman, who became one of the leading generals in the French revolutionary army and whose adventures and mishaps inspired his son (who was four when his father died).

The story begins when Alex's father Antoine goes to Saint-Domingue to seek his fortune and ultimately "disappears" for a while after running into problems with his brothers and others, only to reappear when it seems he may be able to claim his inheritance back in France. He sold his son into slavery to pay for his own passage to France, but then buys him back and sends for him to come to France to join him. The year is 1776, and Thomas-Alexandre is 14 years old. His father enrolls him in a fencing academy and he becomes quite the young gentleman around town, often admired, but sometimes encountering racist comments and actions. After his father remarries, in 1786, he enlists in the army, not as an officer but as a common soldier in the dragoons, and takes the name Alexandre Dumas, rejecting the aristocratic name and title and identifying himself as the son of Cessette and Antoine Dumas.

From there, his adventures begin, as he becomes involved in various activities relating to the Revolution. Having previously discussed slavery in France's American colonies and how people of color were treated in France under the laws relating to slavery, Reiss now describes the blossoming of a period in which people of color were considered citizens of France along with the white people, a time in which schools were multiracial and people of color could advance in the army. Along the way, Alex falls in love with Marie-Louise, a white woman, and her republican father couldn't have been more thrilled to have this handsome, dashing man for his son-in-law, only requesting that he make sergeant before the pair get married. Little did he imagine that Alex would already be a lieutenant colonel by the time he returned. Reiss describes what is happening in the revolution and how this complicates reporting requirements for army officers, as well as what happened in the wars it undertook to spread its republican mandate. We see Alex undertaking daring and heroic actions as he leads his men (even generals led from the front, not the back, in those days) and getting promoted to general. In the Alps, as part of the Army of Italy, he encounters dangers in the form of mountains and glaciers, as well as Austrians and impatient revolutionary bureaucrats back in Paris. And it is in the Army of Italy that he first meets another general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who will become his nemesis.

Alex goes with General Bonaparte (not yet just Napoleon) on his ill-fated expedition to Egypt. There, the Egyptians tend to think that six-foot Alex, riding a horse as if the horse were part of him, is the leader, not the shorter, less imposing, and less handsome Bonaparte. Needless to say, this adds to Bonaparte's dislike of Alex. After a military disaster, Bonaparte sneaks back to France, leaving Alex and his colleagues to find their own way back. It is then that Alex gets captured by the Neapolitans in southern Italy and is imprisoned in a cell in a medieval castle for two years while they try to figure out what to do with him. His experiences are harrowing, and form some of the basis for his son's novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. Eventually he is released and comes home to Marie-Louise; shortly thereafter, their only son, the future novelist is born. But Alex's health has been ruined, and the new government under Napoleon has no interest in helping him, and racial laws are returning, and he dies.

This book is a compelling read for so many reasons, as I alluded to above. It was so readable, in fact, that I worried about the scholarship, until I discovered the 45 pages of endnotes, several for almost every page, and the 16 pages of selected bibliography, including three of primary sources. I especially liked the way Reiss works in the history of everything from sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue to the ins and outs of southern Italian alliances while still telling the story of Alex Dumas. This is a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man and his era, and above all it is fun and thought-provoking.

I'm glad to read your positive comments on The Black Count. It's on my library wish list and I've made a mental note to try to get to it soon.

I'll definitely be putting The Black Count on my TBR list. I'm always looking for well-written biographies (with good documentation!) to serve as examples, since I write (short) biographies of my ancestors after researching them.

The Black Count goes on my wishlist- thank you for the great review1

#46: Thanks for the review and recommendation of The Black Count, Rebecca. Into the BlackHole it goes!

Happy Sunday!

Great review of The Black Count, I've already got it on my wishlist but will now be looking out for it.

Thanks, Carrie, Samantha_kathy, Cyrel, Stasia, and Kerry. It's a fun and informative book.

I thought The Black Count sounded interesting - it was Book of the Week here on Radio 4, but that always means tasters as BOTW is always just one week - 5 x 15 minute episodes. I think the only book it put me off last year was Paul Auster's most recent memoir.

I have a NetGalley of The Black Count that I will have to bump up the reading priority list...

Now, here's a question for you -- Balzac or Zola? I've decided to start one of these two series this year, but which one? I'm also going to be reading them in French, I think... Can't believe I've not read either!

>46 rebeccanyc:: thumb and wishlist!

Thanks, everyone. Suz, I haven't read any Balzac, although I expect to for the Author Theme Reads group, but I can certainly wholeheartedly recommend Zola. And good good good for you to read him in French!

Copied from Linda's thread. The idea is to answer the questions with books you read in 2012.

Describe yourself: The Age of Doubt
Describe how you feel: Nervous Conditions
Describe where you currently live: The Kingdom of This World
If you could go anywhere, where would you go? The Mansion of Happiness
Your favorite form of transportation: No answer for this one.
Your best friend is: The Terra-Cotta Dog
You and your friends are: The Rebel Angels
What's the Weather Like: Tempest-Tost
You fear: World War Z
What is the best advice you have to give? The Patience of the Spider
Thought for the Day: An Awfully Big Adventure
How I would like to die: When I Whistle
My Soul's Present Condition: A Mixture of Frailties

Thanks, Linda!

Great meme! Just remember not to whistle until you're ready. ;)

Ha ha! I can't whistle, so does that mean I'll live forever?

It surely must. If you ever learn to whistle, though, you're doomed!

Great review of The Black Count. I had requested it as an ER too, but received something else. I think it would be a great read, right after the group read of The Count of Monte Cristo.

3. The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

This is such a magnificent book that it is difficult for me to know what to say about it. It can be read as the tale of an epic and exciting struggle, man against nature in the form of the sea, the winds, and the creatures, an adventure that in places keeps the reader on the edge of the seat. But it is so so much more. Hugo explores everything from the natural world and social structure of the Channel Islands to the genesis and progress of storms to the geology and vegetation of caverns to the construction of sailing and steam boats to important winds of the world to the types of religion on the different islands to the psychology of loss to techniques of carpentry and blacksmithing to the contrast of science and philosophy -- and much more. And yet, despite the digressive nature of much of this, as well as the fact that while some of it consists of perceptive observation, some of it is flights of fancy, or at least the wanderings of an active mind, I found it fascinating.

This was my first introduction to Hugo's writing, thanks to the Author Theme Read's group group read, and I was unprepared for the beauty of his writing -- or that I would like the excesses of his writing in which many words and phrases are better than a few words and a single phrase. Here is an example:

Possibility is a formidable matrix. Mystery takes concrete form in monsters. Fragments of darkness emerge from the mass we call immanence, tear themselves apart, break off, roll, float, condense, borrow matter from the surrounding blackness, undergo unheard of polarizations, take on life, compose themselves into curious forms with darkness and curious souls with miasma, and go on their way, like masks among living and breathing beings. They are like darkness made into animals. What is the point of them? What purpose do they serve? We return to the eternal question. p. 354

And Hugo is also a consummate story teller, who has a talent for foreshadowing. When the normally predictable ship captain Sieur Clubin slips off to buy a revolver and a bottle of brandy, the reader can't help but wonder why. When Gilliat, the hero, wanders into a magnificent cavern, sees another entrance to it, and hears a little rustling in the water, the reader knows he will return and encounter whatever creature is there. Even an event that I thought was the end of something turned out not to be so (trying to be vague to avoid spoilers). In places, the novel is incredibly exciting -- and there is also a love story.

So what is this book about, aside from being a great tale? It is easy to see it as allegorical, with Hugo in exile on the Channel Islands and feeling the social goals he has professed have been shipwrecked but can be recovered through struggle. It is also easy to see psychological and mythical angles to the book -- man's struggle for meaning, monsters in deep caverns. I tend to think it is all of these and, although I am not good at reading slowly, I would almost like to start over at the beginning, now that I've followed the plot, to gain a deeper appreciation of the writing and Hugo's ideas.

My Modern Library edition was enhanced by some of Hugo's drawings of ships and the sea and by helpful endnotes.

Hello rebeccanyc---i haven't been on librarything in a while. I have just gotten back in the swing of things so to speak. I see you're reading some very interesting and to my mind challenging books. For me, I am determined to make a dent in the books that I own. I know I'll be reading a wild assortment of books. I look foward to seeing what else you'll be reading.

Thanks for stopping by, mamachunk, and happy reading!

4. Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi

This book grew on me as I read it. In the first chapter, the unnamed narrator decides to visit his estranged childhood friend Kornél Esti, a fellow writer and indeed an alter ego who looks exactly like him and who encouraged him in all his pranks and bad boy activities as a child and young man. He finds Esti somewhat down on his luck and suggests that they "stick together" from that point onwards and collaborate in writing a book about Esti's exploits. After some discussion of how this will work and whose name will be bigger on the cover, they agree that Esti will tell stories of his life to the narrator, stories that may or may not be true, and the narrator will "edit" them slightly.

The rest of the book takes off from there in a series of episodic chapters, more or less in chronological order. Some of Esti's stories border on the realistic, others are fantastic or metaphorical or whimsical or disturbing -- or a mixture of all of these, and Esti does not always present himself as an admirable person. Written in the early 1930s, itself a time of growing turmoil, the book takes place both before and after the first world war, the war which finally toppled the Austro-Hungarian empire and resulted in the loss of a significant portion of what had been Hungary to neighboring countries. Never alluded to directly, this is nonetheless a dividing line in Hungarian history and in Hungarian self-perception.

Many of the stories are delightful (although always thought-provoking) -- for example, there is a story about a town in which everyone always tells the truth (so that a restaurant might advertize "Inedible food, undrinkable drinks"); one about a magnificent hotel with hundreds of staff members, each of whom resembles (or is) a famous person such as Thomas Edison, Rodin, and Marie Antoinette; one in which he struggles to get rid of an inheritance; one in which a friend who says he will only stay for a few minutes ends up staying for hours; and one in which he carries on a conversation with a Bulgarian train conductor although he speaks not a word of the language. Others depict life in the literary cafes of Budapest, or the attitudes of peasants, or encounters on trains. Still others are more grim in their portrayal of people with mental illness or in dire financial straits. One of my favorite chapters is the one in which Esti describes his time as a student in Germany; his understated satire of German behavior is priceless, and perhaps a little pointed in 1933. The book ends with Esti boarding a tram that is both real and metaphorical for an unnamed destination that turns out to be the "Terminus."

All in all, I enjoyed this book a lot. Unlike the only other book by Kosztolányi which I've read, Skylark, it does not tell a straightforward story but is quite modern in its almost metafictional style. I also enjoyed Kosztolányi's (or Esti's) technique of occasionally mixing story-telling with philosophical thoughts, while providing a fanciful yet serious picture of a world which was already slipping away when he wrote.

Intriguing, Rebecca!

"a tram that is bother real"...both?

Great review of Toilers of the Sea. I need to read more Victor Hugo. I've only read Hunchback which is fantastic, and yes filled with beautiful literary excess. His novels take patience, but they are worth the time. Les Mis is on my nook, but I'm going to WL this one too.

Two terrific reviews of what sound like intriguing books. I'm delighted to finally catch up with you.

Victor Hugo is remembered for the Hunchback and Les Mis but he wrote so much more didn't he? I must also track down a copy of Toilers of the Sea.

Your unpronounceable collection of short stories by the unpronounceable European also looks top notch but how the heck would you ask for it in the store?

Have a lovely weekend Rebecca.

66 Tui, thanks, and thanks for catching my typo! Fixed!

And thanks, Cammy and ffortsa!

ETA Thanks Paul (you posted while I was posting). Actually, it is a novel told in episodes, not a collection of short stories.

Kornel Esti has made the wish list. It looks right up my alley! Great review.

Great review of Kornél Esti, Rebecca! That also sounds like a book I would like, so it goes onto my wish list. BTW, this book is available for Kindle owners in the US ($9.99), although the book's home page on LT would indicate otherwise.

http://www.amazon.com/Kornel-Esti-ebook/dp/B009O6ZANS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

#62: Well, I get to dodge that particular BB as I have already read it. I have always thought it a shame that Toilers is not better known.

#65: No chance that my local library will ever have that one, but I live in hope. Into the BlackHole it goes!

5. My Century by Aleksander Wat

Part prison/internal exile memoir, part intellectual history, this compelling and moving book is most fundamentally an exploration of ethics, human dignity, and religious struggle in the face of the horrors of Stalinism, Nazism, and the second world war. Born in 1900, Wat was the son of assimilated, intellectual Warsaw Jews who first became a futurist/dadist poet in the 1920s and, starting at the end of the decade, flirted with communism as the editor of The Literary Monthly. Arrested by the Poles, he was jailed for the first time, but not for long. Later, he rejected communism, largely because of the people who were executed (although he continued to be called a "Jewish communist")." When the Nazis invaded Poland, he and his wife, Ola, and son fled to L'wow, but became separated, although they did eventually find each other. After some time in L'wow, Wat was arrested by the Soviets and began his journey through a variety of prisons, including Moscow's notorious Lubyanka, before winding up "free" in Alma-Ata and the neighboring town of Ili.

The book is based on a series of lengthy interviews with Wat conducted by fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in Berkeley and Paris in the mid-1960s, shortly before Wat's death; he was in extreme pain even during the interviews and ultimately chose to commit suicide. Thus, except for two chapters which Wat had the opportunity to edit and make more literary, the reader is hearing Wat's voice as he talked to Milosz. And what a voice it is -- perceptive, informed, rigorously honest about human strengths and failings (including his own), unsentimental, at times prejudiced (but aware of that prejudice, e.g., the idea that Poles are superior to Russians, especially "Asian" Russians), warm, and often poetic.

The early part of the book depicts the literary and political scene in Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s and was filled with the names of Polish and other intellectuals; this was a little heavy going for someone unfamiliar with that scene (although there is a very helpful list of people mentioned at the end of my NYRB edition). But the story picked up as the war started and the Wats fled. Wat's descriptions of the people he met in various prisons, the horrific conditions in many of them, how to adapt to prison life, the different types of interrogators, how bedbugs behave, the different kinds of lice, and much more are both spare and detailed, fascinating and profoundly depressing. Wat was very acute at picking up signs from people and hypothesized that his interrogator in the Lubyanka was no longer interested in his "crime" but was instead picking his brain about the Polish literary and intellectual scene in anticipation of the Soviets taking over Poland in the future. In prison, he worried terribly about what had happened to his family, engaged in in-depth conversations with other intellectuals, pondered (as all do) who are the informers, and underwent a religious experience in which he saw "the devil in history" and converted to Catholocism. When the Germans approached Moscow, the Lubyanka was evacuated and Wat was sent to a variety of prisons further east. Ultimately released, although barely alive, he traveled to Alma-Ata (despite not having papers to go there) to try to find Ola and his son; after heroic efforts, he did.. Everyone was desperately hungry, struggling to find food. Through connections with the delegation of the Polish government (in exile in London) in Alma-Ata, Wat was able for a time to find some work and some access to supplies the delegation received from foreign sources, but it was a very hand-to-mouth existence both there and in the smaller town of Ili where they wind up. The book ends, because the interviews ended, but the NYRB edition includes an excerpt from Ola Wat's memoirs which describes Wat's role in resisting the Soviet government's efforts to force Soviet passports on Polish citizens in Ili, and both their experiences in prisons, hers more terrifying than his.

The best part of this book is Wat's voice, his warmth, his perception, and his ceaseless self-evaluation. But almost equally fascinating is the varied cast of characters who pass through Wat's life, from Warsaw intellectuals to urks (Russian criminals), from NKVD officers with aristocratic manners to people from poorer walks of life who help him (or despise him), from people going mad from imprisonment to people who somehow learn to live with it. One of the interesting aspects is that everyone is acutely aware not only of each other's social status within the community of the cell, but also of their ethnicity or national background. In prison and elsewhere, Jews gravitate to other Jews, Poles to other Poles, and so on, and Wat is quick to point out if someone has a Mongol-type face, or looks like a Kazakh. This makes the challenge of the Stalinist effort to make all the various nationalities "Soviet" come alive. Finally, I found Wat's thoughts about such varied topics as the similarities between communism and Nazism, how to talk to interrogators, nighttime conversations between a former Polish cavalry captain and an Ukrainian peasant based on their shared love of animals, literary works and people, religion and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, endlessly fascinating.

Superb review of My Century, Rebecca, although it sounds too depressing for my taste.

Yes, excellent review. I'm sure it is a book quite capable of going outside my comfort zone, but I'm interested enough to put it on the WL. I have great respect for Milosz and trust him not to waste a reader's time.

Excellent review! And one I can order for a reasonable price without having to purchase a kindle.....
:-|

6. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Since reading Wolf Hall when it came out, I've devoured most of Hilary Mantel's fiction and admired her for the breadth and bravery of her work. So I was excited to get back to the world of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell that got me started on my Mantel journey. As is well known, Bring Up the Bodies tells the tale of the downfall of Anne Boleyn, wife #2, from the perspective of the ever fascinating Cromwell: the intrigue, the backbiting, the rumors, the gossip, and the diplomacy.

For me, as I think for Mantel, it is the character of Cromwell that makes this book, both because I am not a devotee of Tudor history and because the endless self-aggrandizement of most of the nobles -- those who serve the king and queen and those who seek to increase their power and their wealth through their actions or their relatives -- is so unappetizing. This is not to say that other characters, some quite interesting, don't spring to life, but that they pale in comparison to the complex Cromwell.

This book doesn't have the breadth of Wolf Hall, which covered a large swath of Cromwell's life; rather it spans less than a year, during which the fate of Anne Boleyn is sealed. Helpfully, Mantel provides a list of character at the beginning, grouped by category, as the characters are many and their connections confusing. Just as the time period is condensed, the action is intense, and the plotting and counterplotting complex. As always, Mantel writes beautifully and perceptively, with never a wasted word. She can provide compassion where appropriate and twist the knife where warranted. I look forward to the final volume of this trilogy.

7. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

I wouldn't have read, or even known about, this book if not for an intriguing review by steven03tx. I found it mostly compulsively readable, but I had mixed feelings about it. While, especially at the end, I could barely put it down, some parts seemed to drag a little bit, some plot "surprises" were so well foreshadowed that they weren't much of a surprise, and the time that has passed since Willis wrote it in 1992 makes some aspects of the future of the 2050s seem dated.

For this is a novel of the future, in which time travel -- at least for research purposes -- is possible, but other than this remarkable advance much in 2050s Oxford is the same as it was in 1990s Oxford. There, in the 2050s, in the absence of the head of the Medieval History department, and with the department's experienced technical staff away during the Christmas holidays, an ambitious, vain, and foolish assistant head is determined to send Kivrin, an aspiring historian, through "the net" to the year 1320, much to the despair of her mentor Dunworthy from another department and college who, in an effort to avert disaster, recruits Badri, a technician from his college, to run "the drop." Needless to say, all does not go well. Badri falls ill at the console while checking "the fix," tries but fails to tell Dunworthy what went wrong, and becomes the index case in a deadly influenza epidemic that strikes Oxford. Experience from past pandemics dictates that the area be quarantine; will they still be able to bring Kivrin back at the appointed time.

Meanwhile, in the middle ages, Kivrin arrives and realizes that she is very ill. Feverish and delirious, she is rescued by unknown men from the site where she was dropped and brought to the home of a family that is sheltering there while the man of the house stays in Bath, where he is involved in some legal proceedings. Kivrin knows that she can't have the plague, because she has been inoculated against it and because the plague didn't reach Oxford until 1348, but is puzzled why the various inoculations she's had aren't fighting it. She's also puzzled because although she can understand the "contemps" as they're called, her automatic translation device isn't translating her thoughts into language they can understand. And how can she find the site where she was "dropped" so she can be picked up at the appointed time?

As the novel progresses, various characters, some endearing, some not, make their appearances in the Oxford of the past and the Oxford of the present. Soon, there are epidemics in both times, and so the reader can compare and contrast the behavior of people in the 14th century with those of the 21st when confronted with widespread illness and death. Especially in the 21st century, there are lots of intersecting story lines, perhaps as befits a busy and bustling town, but not all of them were, perhaps, necessary. It was here that the most striking anachronism, for me, was the tremendous efforts people put into trying to reach others by phone -- landlines (albeit with video), that is. Obviously when this was written in the early 90s, the ubiquity of mobile phones was unimaginable. On the other hand, I found the descriptions of Kivrin's preparations for her visit to the middle ages, from languages to inoculations, from clothing to behavior, fascinating.

This is a novel both of action and of ideas, a novel with intriguing characters and a satire of academia, a novel that lightly explores the place and value of religion and human connections. Although parts of it irritated me, I'm glad I read it.

8. Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Warning: Some plot spoilers ahead!

In this fascinating novel, the historical tale of Victor Hughes (the "Caribbean Robespierre") and the fictional story of a young sister, brother, and cousin anchor a sweeping look at the natural and social history of the colonial and even precolonial Caribbean. Victor Hughes, a man of action who has been a baker, sailor, and trader, appears one night pounding on the doors of young Carlos, Sophia, and Esteban, who have been in mourning since their father and uncle died. It is the late 1780s in Havana, and the young people have kept to their home and lived quite eccentrically, exploring the arts and new ideas inside the four walls of their large house, allowing the executor to manage the family's warehouse and trading business. Hughes brings them back to the world, introduces them to Ogé, a mulatto (in the language of the day) who cures Esteban, the cousin, of his terrible asthma by removing the plants that are causing it, and also to various masonic ideas. A hurricane hits (what would a Caribbean novel be without a hurricane?), word of the French Revolution reaches Havana and foreigners begin to be distrusted, and Hughes, fleeing with Ogé, takes Sophia and Esteban with him to Haiti. Thus begin the travels and travails of Hughes and Esteban (Sophia is eventually sent back to Cuba), first to revolutionary France, then back to the Caribbean.

After a dangerous journey, avoiding an English blockade off the French coast and then fighting them when they reach the Caribbean, they arrive in Guadeloupe where Hughes has been designated the Commissioner of the convention, the revolution's representative and local man in charge. But they have not come alone: a guillotine is with them.

With all the insignia of his authority sparkling, Victor Hughes stood motionless, turned to stone, his right hand resting on the upright of the Machine, suddenly transformed into a symbolic figure. Together with Liberty, the first guillotine was arriving in the New World." p. 131

After Robespierre's own execution, Hughes falls out of favor with the powers that be, but carries on as if nothing has happened, turning the French fleet into profiteering buccaneers. He lets Esteban, who has long become disillusioned with Hughes, flee to Cayenne in Guiana, then another French colony. There, and along the jungle-covered rivers of Guiana, the detritus of the French Revolution has washed up, men who have been sent there to exile and/or imprisonment, facing certain death. But Hughes himself is a survivor, and ultimately becomes Napoleon's representative in Guadeloupe, while Esteban return to Havana, finding things quite changed.

The story, as event-filled as it is (with revolution, pirates, sexual exploits, and more), is really just a backdrop for a novel of ideas, ideas about slavery and freedom, colonialism, the role of art and the role of action, religion and masonry, integrity, and more. Victor Hughes is, as noted, a man of action, but he is also a man who loves power. When the wind from France blows with freedom, saying that all people, black and white, are free citizens, nobody is more avid than Hughes in enforcing the law, despite the horror and resistance of the colonial elite (the "big whites"). But, eight years later, when the wind blows the other way, he is just as eager to enforce the new law, sending the freed black people back into slavery. Beyond the obvious, the novel also explores people's freedom of action as it depicts Esteban's and Sophia's reactions to Hughes and his behavior. In some ways, this is Esteban's coming-of-age story..

Lying beneath all of this is the Caribbean itself -- the sea, the islands, the mainland, and the people. The novel sweeps from Cuba and Haiti at the northern end of the Sea to Guiana in the south, with much action on boats traveling through it. Carpentier's writing is gorgeous as he describes the water and the sea shores, as for example when Esteban explores rocks along the shoreline:

There were the pulpy leaves of the madrepore; the speckled, pitcher-shaped apples of the cowries; the slender cathedral architecture of certain snails, which, with their winged and needle-pointed shells, could only be seen in terms of the Gothic; the beaded whorls of the sea periwinkles, the Pythagorean convolution of the spindle-shell, the simulation with which many shells concealed in their depths the splendor of an ornate palace, under the humble plaster of their exterior. At his approach, the sea urchin proffered its black spines, the timid oyster closed, the starfish shrank, and the sponges, attached to some submerged rock, swayed among rippling reflections. p. 175

He also beautifully depicts the northern journey of the Caribs and their encounter with European ships. Much is told in almost mythical language, often involving unfamiliar (to me) masonic terminology. This is a book written on many levels, and I have only scratched the surface. Carpentier has achieved the remarkable feat of intertwining compelling story-telling with psychological insight, historical and social perspective, and beautiful writing.

As a final note, the translation I read (which I believe to be the only English translation) is a translation from the French translation of the Spanish original. I have no reason the think the translation is a bad one, but I have no idea why the publisher (the University of Minnesota Press) couldn't have obtained a translation from the Spanish as easily as one from the French. Additionally, I think a more literal translation of the Spanish title, (El siglo de las luces) as something like "The Century of Light" or (as Timothy Brennan suggests in his introduction) "The Age of Enlightenment" would have been more meaningful than "Explosion in a Cathedral" (which is the title of a painting that hangs in the Havana house).

9. The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola

The strength of this novel is its almost overwhelming depiction of the merchandise in the Ladies' Paradise, one of the first Parisian department stores, and of Parisian women's insatiable demand for the goods it offers. The weakness is the plot and the characterization; the usually brilliant story-teller Zola falls down on that aspect of the job in this novel. However, a less good Zola is still a lot better than a lot of other books!

At the beginning of this novel, an orphaned provincial young woman, Denise, brings her two younger brothers (one a young man, one a child) to Paris, hoping to stay at the home of their uncle, who owns a small store. His business is failing, however, because Octave Mouret, the protagonist of Pot Luck, has turned the small store he acquired by marrying Mme. Hedouin (who subsequently died) into a department store which is stealing business from all the shop-owners in the neighborhood. Despite the fact that everyone she meets hates the Ladies' Paradise, Denise is attracted by it and has no other option except to get a job there as a salesgirl; this entitles her to a small room in which to live as well as her meals. As the novel progresses, she encounters various problems, is fired and then rehired, and comes to the attention of Mouret, who is the creative genius and dictatorial ruler of the store. A ladies man, he somewhat unbelievably becomes romantically interested in Denise; although she resists, her prestige rises in the store. I found the character of Denise much too meek and good to be true, and I couldn't believe the romantic attachment between Mouret and her.

So much for the plot. Zola dazzles the reader, as Mouret dazzles the shoppers, with his descriptions of the displays and the merchandise and the ways in which the female shoppers almost swoon over it. He also brilliantly dissects the inner workings of a department store: how the goods enter, how they're sold, how they're paid for, how they're shipped out, how the finances work, how the different types of employees are encouraged to compete with each other and how, mostly cattily, they treat each other, how shoplifting works and is caught, and much more. Another aspect of the novel is real estate: the creation of the large boulevards of Paris (as described in other works in the Rougon-Macquart cycle) and the attempts to cash in on them, as well as Mouret's machinations to acquire the right parcels to create a store that fills the entire block. Although Zola also tries to show how this drives the other merchants out of business, this part of the story is less fully told. As a portrait of the growth of department stores, materialism, and commercialism, this novel is fascinating, if not horrifying, and a meaningful contribution to Zola's goal of giving readers a full picture of life of during the Second Empire. It just isn't a very good story.

Great reviews, Rebecca. I am sorry to have gotten so far behind on them!

Thanks for stopping by, Stasia. I know how busy you are with school, work, and family, so don't worry about not getting here sooner!

10. Old Man Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

It is difficult to read the sections of this novel that deal with Père Goriot as a father and not think of King Lear -- but King Lear without any Cordelia. These sections, in which his role as a father who sacrifices his wealth and his happiness to his two hideously ungrateful daughters, are the ones in which the original title of "Father" Goriot is most important, and are also the ones that are most painful for the reader. But this novel is much more than the story of Goriot and his daughters. Instead, through the lens of the denizens of a run-down (but "respectable") boarding house in 1819/1820 Paris, Balzac creates a picture of the breadth of Parisian society, from the hereditary nobility on down to the criminals and pawnbrokers.

Much of the story follows Eugène de Rastignac, the son of a somewhat impoverished provincial noble family, who comes to Paris to study law. He stays in the boarding house of Madame Vauquer, along with a variety of others, including not only Goriot but also a mysterious but compelling man named Vautrin and a young woman, Victorine, whose extremely rich father has abandoned her, both of whom play major roles in the plot. Through a noble relative, who is at the height of Parisian society, Rastignac meets first one and then two lovely women, sisters, who turn out to be Goriot's two daughters who have married into the second tier of Parisian society, wealthy men and women who are not hereditary nobles. He finds this world of wealth and social entertaining extremely seductive, and borrows money from his loving family to fund a new set of clothes that will enable him to enter it. Partly this is Rastignac's coming of age story, as he moves from being a naive provincial young man who doesn't know his way around Parisian society to the suitor of one of the daughters, Delphine de Nucingen. However, at the same time that Rastignac is paying court to Delphine, Vautrin has cooked up a plot to help Victorine get her father's money and marry Rastignac.

Rastignac doesn't completely lose his sense of honesty and compassion as he enters a world in which both husbands and wives have other lovers: he pays his family back (albeit by gambling) and is kind to Goriot, who is despised and almost tormented by the other denizens of the boarding house (who thought the two elegant young women visiting him were prostitutes, not his daughters). Because much of the plot deals with the goings-on in the boarding house, where Goriot is not thought of as a father, it didn't bother me that the translator calls him old man Goriot instead of Father Goriot, something SassyLassy raised in her review of this book. The book is largely about love and money and how they are intertwined -- or not: at one point, Rastignac muses "Vautrin is right. Wealth equals virtue." But, of course, it doesn't.

Some of the plot seemed a little melodramatic to me, but overall this book vividly portrays life in Paris during this post-revolutionary period, sometimes in incredible detail, from the location and decor of the house to the appearance and behavior of the characters to slang trends of the times to which tradesman give credit and how various diseases are treated. Each character is fully developed, and the sights and sounds of Paris come alive. Balzac was one of the first "naturalistic" French writers, one tried to describe life as it really was and who inspired other authors such as Zola. He can also be quite funny in places. This is the first of his works I've read, and while I don't think I'll become as enthused about Balzac as I am about Zola, I will probably read more of his work.

Hi Rebecca. Loved your review of Old Man Goriot. It's one of my all-time favorite books, though I'd agree that Balzac is not the storyteller that Zola is. Though I read it some years ago, those characters, their situations and their motivations become more compelling and universal as time goes by. I see them in so many contemporary people and situations. For some reason, it's a book I think about very often - much more than most others I read.

Great reviews.
I seem to remember seeing a film about Ola Wat's experiences in the Gulag at the Toronto Film Festival a few years back - I will have to check.

#85 I can see how the characters and their motivations seem universal, and I wonder if I will continue to think about the book too!

#86 Oh, that sounds interesting, Cyrel. Her section of the book was remarkable.

I'm stuck in the Wat book. Hoping to get back to it before I lose steam. :-(

11. Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The most remarkable thing about this fascinating biography, which essentially shows how "Soso" Djugashvili became Stalin, is the amazing use Montefiore makes of the incredibly rich resources of recently opened Soviet and especially Georgian and other Caucasian archives. From memoirs recorded(?) by Stalin's mother, to those of the friends of his childhood and his colleagues in his early days as a thug for Bolshevism, these documents reveal much about the young Stalin and his environment, and Montefiore weaves them into a history that reads almost like a novel.

From his earliest years, Stalin exhibited the kind of drive, cunning, contempt for others, sense of his own superiority, and willingness to commit violence, albeit on a smaller stage, that stood him is such bad stead when he came to power. He prided himself on his ability to sniff out spies (although, it turns out, he was often woefully wrong) and he was a master of saving his own skin and escaping from dangerous situations. The story of his childhood, with an ambitious (for him) mother abandoned by an alcoholic husband, and his "adoption" by other families who his mother felt could help him get ahead (specifically by going to a seminary for his education) is fascinating, as is his interest in revolutionary ideas and his affinity for thugs and crime. (While he was studying in the seminary, he read a lot and it was a little disconcerting to learn of his enthusiasm for books I also like, including Germinal and Toilers of the Sea.) For a while he helped finance Lenin's work through bank and other robberies in the Georgian region; he and members of other pre-revolutionary groups also basically extorted money from oil barons in the Caucasus to support their activities.

Another interesting aspect of this book was the insight into the effectiveness of the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police. According to Montefiore, they were one of the best spy services of the era and had double agents very close to the top in the Bolshevik and other parties. Certainly, Stalin was arrested several times and sent into exile, from which he escaped every time except the last time, when he was sent to an extremely remote (and cold) area of Siberia. His experiences there, where he became friendly with some of the local tribespeople, are fascinating. It was at a dinner with fellow Bolshevik exiles in Siberia that Stalin, in a discussion of the greatest pleasures in life, said "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." (p. 295) And Molotov said, "A little piece of Siberia remained lodged in Stalin for the rest of his life." (p. 301)

Stalin was quite the ladies man. While in Siberia, he impregnated (twice) a girl who was initially 13 years old, and he was involved with dozens of women and girls over the years and abandoned them all. Early on, he married, but his wife died soon thereafter, and he ignored their son who remained in Georgia. By the end of this volume, in 1917, he had gotten involved with Nadya Alleiluva, who would become his second wife.

Stalin recognized that Lenin was the key to the revolution and to power, and increasingly sought to stay close to him and help him. Lenin, Stalin's opposite in background, recognized in him a kindred hard-liner and somebody who, with his coterie of thugs, could make certain things happen that his more intellectual hangers-on could not. After the Bolsheviks took over the Winter Palace in October 1917, Stalin and Trotsky were the only people allowed to enter Lenin's office whenever they wanted. The book presents a strong picture of Lenin as well, and makes the case that Leninism and Stalinism were aligned, not that Stalinism was a perversion of Leninism. Lenin is quoted as responding to a proposal by Kamenev and Trotsky that capital punishment in the army be abolished by saying, "What nonsense! How can you have a revolution without shooting people?" (p. 350)

Montefiore also argues that Stalin

"could not have risen to power at any other time in history; it required the synchronicity of man and moment. His unlikely rise as a Georgian who could rule Russia was only made possible by the internationalist character of Marxism. His tyranny was made possible by the beleaguered circumstances of Soviet Russia, the utopian fanaticism of its quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin's homicidal vision of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Stalin would not have been possible if Lenin had not, in the first days of the regime, defeated Kamenev's milder way to create the machinery for so boundless and absolute a power. That was the forum for which Stalin was superbly equipped. Now Stalin could become Stalin." (p. 353)

Finally, a word from Montefiore about his sources.

I have been hugely fortunate in finding new sources, often unpublished or partly unpublished, and barely previously used by historians. Archival sources are more reliable than oral histories, but of course they too have their dangers and must be analysed carefully. But the anti-Stalinist histories often turn out to be just as unreliable.

Many of the archives used in this book, for example, were recorded by official Party historians . . . Therefore, one must be constantly aware that they were recorded under constant pressure to present Stalin in a good light. At all times, one has to be aware of the circumstances and try to penetrate the Bolshevik language to see what the witnesses are really trying to tell us.

Yet those recorded before the Terror in 1937 are often astonishingly frank, tactless, or derogatory about Stalin: a derogatory story about Stalin in an official memoir is almost certainly true. Many of the witnesses were so naive or honest that their memoirs were unusable at the time, or only usable in small sections. Such memoirs were not destroyed, but were simply preserved in the archives. Many were edited, then copied and sent to Stalin's Moscow archive, so there are differences between versions. But the originals usually survived in the local archive." (p. 385)

He goes on, but this gives a flavor of his approach. He also conducted many interviews with descendents of key people. The effort that went into telling this story is remarkable.

This is a compelling and chilling portrait, and I am eager to read Monefiore's sequel, The Court of the Red Tsar (which he actually wrote first).

12. The City Builder by George Konrád

This was a difficult book to read and is a difficult one to write about. Why? Both because of the structure of the novel and because of Konrád's writing style. The narrator is a city planner in an unnamed Hungarian town who has lived through both World War II and the communist takeover. But the reader doesn't know this at first (except from reading the blurb on the back of the book). Instead, the book begins as the narrator wakes up one morning and muses about various topics including the death of his wife. But he muses in what is essentially a stream of consciousness way, and the whole book is like this, occasionally direct and understandable but more often dream-like and even surrealistic. Additionally, Konrád writes by piling phrase upon phrase, image upon image, and it is often not at all clear what he is writing about or how one topic connects to another.

Essentially, the narrator is reviewing his life, but in a nonchronological manner. The reader learns not only about the death of his wife, but about his childhood, his father, how he met his wife, the nature of his work and how it differs from that of his father who was a pre-communism planner and architect, the nature of socialist planning, wartime, prison, torture, God and religion, and more. The novel is also a meditation on the meaning of life and freedom, history and social revolutions, cities and communities, and fathers and sons. But all of this is enveloped in prose that is hard to decipher, although beautifully written. Here is an example, by far not the most obscure.

For me, this city is a challenge, a parable, an interrogation frozen in space, the messages of my fellow citizens dead and alive, a system of disappearing and regenerating worlds to come, the horizontal delineation of societies replacing one another by sperm, gunfire, senility; a fossilized tug of war, an Eastern European showcase of devastation and reconstruction . . . Because by virtue of my practiced clichés I have become one of its shareholders; though beyond the tenuous links of my existence and surroundings, beyond my father's overdecorated gravestone and the haunting shadow of a cremated woman, beyond my hardened and irremediable blueprints, my myopic utopias, and the procession of figures out of an ever-darkening past, I could well ask: what have I to do with this East-Central European city whose every shame I know so well. p.22

The introduction to my Dalkey Archive edition, by Carlos Fuentes, compares the experience and writing style of Central Europeans to those of writers from Central and South America and contrasts them with writers from the west, and especially those from the US who, to oversimplify, he feels are always seeking happiness. I didn't find his thoughts particularly helpful in understanding Konrád or this book, but I see some parallels between Konrád's writing style and that of Fuentes in Terra Nostra although, of course, they deal with very different subjects.

I felt lost through a lot of this novel but, having finished, I almost feel I should start at the beginning again to more fully appreciate what Konrád was doing. I feel I missed a lot the first time through, but I understood enough to realize what an impressive writer Konrád is and what complicated ideas he was exploring.

Hi Rebecca--I always feel guilty about not commenting more on your thread, since you are such a regular commenter on mine. I always read your thread though, and always enjoy your excellent reviews.

I hope to get to Balzac soon (as in before his "quarter" ends, so to speak). I have his The Gondreville Mystery, which I'd never heard of, but was among the books we received from my in-laws' library, or I may reread Pere Goriot or Eugenie Grandet, which I also have. I just recently read Cousin Bette which I rank up there with the best of Zola.

I read The Case Worker by George Konrad a few years ago, and The City Builder sounds very similar in tone and style. The Case Worker was about a social worker in a very grim city and time (behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War), and the cases that wore him down. While it was an excellent book, I didn't feel inspired to read anything else by him. It is interesting that in both these books the protagonist's occupation seems to play such an important role.

I also want to note that in my last bookstore visit I came across Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes in a mass market paperback which I picked up based on your review, even though I had never before been interested in Fuentes. I don't know when I'll get to it though--it looks like a massive undertaking.

Thanks for stopping by, Deborah. I have Cousin Bette but I'm reading Lost Illusions first because I'm eager to encounter Vautrin again. I've also ordered The Case Worker. And, as for Terra Nostra, it took me almost 2 months to read it, if I remember right!

I also realized I got confused this morning and posted on both your Club Read and 75 Books threads; like you, I have both. This year, interestingly, my Club Read thread seems more popular than this one!

Hi, Rebecca. Can I ask what translation of Pere Goriot you read (if you read a translation) and whether you would recommend it?

It was a Penguin edition translated by Olivia McCannon, and I thought it was fine. Excellent notes too.

Thanks!

13. Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding

I was eager to read this book after reading the delightful Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth, in which Jonathan Wild, a historical figure, is featured as the villain of the tale, both because I looked forward to learning more about Wild and because this is an example of a very early novel. Alas, although I enjoyed reading it, I was also disappointed for several reasons.

The novel is a satire, in which Wild is considered "great" because he focuses single-mindedly on his own advancement and benefits, without indulging in the "good" "weaknesses" of compassion, honesty, fairness, or consideration of others. Indeed, Wild, along with his mentors and protegees is a sterling example of a "great" man as he regularly steals, incites others to steal, lies, and deceives all around him. One theory is that Fielding was actually satirizing several people high in the British government at the time.

Fielding more or less keeps the plot moving along, with many asides to the reader (an early novel version of metafiction?), although there is a digression or two. My problem is that based on what I learned about Wild from Jack Sheppard and, in fact, on what is historically known about him, this novel takes Wild on a different path, in that he is a thief, but not the notorious "thief-taker" of London, who captured thieves and others and turned them in to the authorities. (Fielding apparently knew he was taking only one aspect of Wild for his satire, and the Oxford World Classic edition I read includes a contemporary biographical sketch of Wild.) Wild is a much more enjoyable villain in Jack Sheppard.

My other problem with the book was that while the satire is witty and fun, it wears thin after a while. It also took me a while to get used to 18th century spelling conventions, in which nouns seem to be capitalized, although I realized that after a while I stopped noticing this. I did find it interesting to read so early a novel, when the approach and style we are used to from, say, 19th century novelists were not in place. I also appreciated the extensive notes which helped explain classical and other references.

Some part of me vaguely remembers reading this in some antediluvian past existence.

14. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac

In this tale of ambition and betrayal, friendship and revenge, deviousness and even devotion, Balzac explores the worlds of Paris and the provinces, of literature and journalism, of business and money-lending, of art and science, and of aristocratic pride versus bourgeois striving. It is a sweeping story that begins with two friends in a small town in southwest France. David Séchard has returned from an apprenticeship in Paris to take over, in an onerous and unfair transaction, his miserly father's printing business; Lucien Chardon, the son of a dead pharmacist, is a budding poet who has managed to be introduced to Madame de Bargeton, the leading lady of the titled set. David, who has dreams of making a fortune by inventing a way to make paper much more cheaply, falls in love with Lucien's sister Eve.

From there, the reader follows Lucien as he makes inroads with Mme de Bargeton,who encourages him to call himself Lucien de Rubempré, after his mother's titled family. He winds up in Paris, where he first falls in with a group of ambitious but principled young men in a variety of fields who debate ideas and generously help each other, but later is seduced by another group of young men who show him how he can make money through the corrupt field of cultural/political journalism, a field which enables him not only to get paid for his columns, which make him the talk of the town, but also to get free books and theater tickets which he can turn around and resell. As a theater journalist, Lucien meets a young (16-year-old) actress, Coralie, who is being kept by an older married man. They fall in love, and essentially live off the generosity of the married man. At least for a while. Plots are hatched, and counterplots are hatched, and Lucien winds up in dire financial straits that lead him to take a step that puts his dear friend David and his beloved sister Eve at risk. Meanwhile, back in the provinces, David has been toiling incessantly at his invention, while losing business in the print shop which is eyed covetously by his competitors, the rapacious, scheming, and very successful Cointet brothers. Much drama ensues.

The plot is complex, and the characters many, but through them Balzac paints a picture of corruption and duplicity in many facets of French life, both in Paris and in the provinces, where to some extent it's every man for himself. While a few characters epitomize goodness and generosity, including Eve (almost unbelievably good!) and the writer d'Arthez, it is the corrupt and evil characters who truly spring to life, as step by step Lucien loses not only his illusions but his integrity. In many ways, this is a profoundly depressing book.

Those who have read Père Goriot will re-encounter Rastignac and, at the very end, a mysterious Spanish priest who is not at all what he seems. I am now reading A Harlot High and Low, in which Lucien returns to Paris under the "protection" of this Spanish priest.

My Modern Library edition, translated by Kathleen Raine, had some good notes at the back illuminating contemporary cultural references and more; unfortunately, they were referenced only by page number and not in the text itself, which made finding them when I needed them into guesswork.

15. News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh

People who have read Haigh's second novel, Baker Towers, will remember the wonderful sense of place and character she created with the western Pennsylvania mining town of Bakerton, and in particular may remember the Novak family who were the focus of the novel. In these stories, Haigh returns to Bakerton and the people who live there, including the Novaks; she structures the book loosely chronologically, with characters appearing in different stories at different times in their lives. The first story takes place on the eve of the second world war, outside Bakerton on the upper west side of New York City, where a young Bakerton girl, working as a live-in housekeeper for a Jewish family, is mystified by their customs and their worries; the last takes place more or less now.

Haigh is a wonderful writer, who I've been following since The Condition came out, and has a talent for compassionately exploring both individuals and families with deep psychological insight. In these stories, we see people who are constrained not only by the failing fortunes of Bakerton but by their own timidity or rigidity, by the secrets that they keep and that are kept from them, and, rarely, by their driving need to get out of Bakerton. We also see the vibrant, yet largely poor, life of the town when the mines are active; the apparently rarefied world in which the mine owners, the Baker brothers and their descendents, live; and the slow wearing away of community when the mines are closed and coal is no longer king.

But, for the most part, these are not depressing stories. Many of the character ultimately achieve some form of insight, even some form of redemption. As Joyce Hauser (née Novak), one of the most restrained and self-restricted characters in the stories, thinks at the end of the last story, in reference to Ed's, her recently dead husband's, failure to convince her to let him teach her how to ride a bicycle,

More than anything in life, she wishes that she'd let him. That she'd smiled for the camera. That she'd said yes. Life was gone before you knew it; how foolish she'd been to refuse any of it. In a couple of months Rebecca (her daughter) would arrive from Paris. they would rise before the neighbors and practice in the driveway, hidden by Ed's birches: fresh cool mornings, dew on the grass. Her daughter would get a kick out of that. It was just the kind of project she'd enjoy. p. 244

16. A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac

This novel picks up the story of Lucien Chambron de Rubempré and the mysterious Spanish priest, Carlos Herrera, who rescues him from where it left off at the end of Lost Illusions. They have returned to Paris, and the priest's wealth and other forms of support help Lucien enter the world of Parisian nobility; he seems to have given up his interest in poetry. As the novel opens, he is in love with Esther, a beautiful former prostitute, having an affair with the married countess Madame de Sérisy, and hoping to marry Clotilde de Grandlieu, the daughter of a duke. Herrera, who the reader who has read other Balzacs soon realizes is Vautrin from Père Goriot, another name for the notorious escaped convict and criminal mastermind Jacques Collin, is out to make Lucien's fortune.

Herrera, along with his henchmen and -women, spins complicated plots and counterplots to "reform" Esther and then, after a period referred to as "A boring chapter, since it describes four years of happiness" in which Esther and Lucien live together, sets Esther up to entrap a rich banker, Nucingen, who has become obsessed with her after an incredibly brief chance sighting, and get enough money from him to enable Lucien to marry Clotilde. While all this is unfolding, a multitude of other characters, including competing police spies hired by characters with competing interests, complicate matters, as do Herrera and his associates. The plot can be confusing, if not melodramatic at times, and I don't want to say too much to avoid spoilers.

Balzac uses this novel to explore how the police and legal systems work, how police spies disguise themselves and take private commissions, how the criminal underworld and prison society work, how the nobility have their own methods and language and how they feel entitled to interfere with the legal system, and how public servants scheme to get ahead.

The French title of this book translates literally as "Splendors and miseries of courtesans," which I think is a better title than "A harlot high and low," but still doesn't capture what is for me the real heart of the novel, the story of Herrera/Vautrin/Collin, who has an astounding understanding of the different levels of French, especially Parisian, society, and a horrifying ability to take advantage of everything that presents itself to him. The question emerges of of the nature of his relationship with Lucien, as it is clear at the end of Lost Illusions that he is homosexual and has proposed to Lucien that he will help him attain status in Parisian society if they become lovers. This isn't mentioned explicitly in this novel, but Herrera certainly has strong feelings for Lucien and for another attractive young man who appears late in the plot. The translator of my edition, in his introduction, rejects this interpretation (he was writing in 1970), but it seems obvious, if veiled by the restrictions of the era, to me.

Although I was eager to read this novel, because Vautrin was such a compelling character in Père Goriot, it was a little overly melodramatic for me, although I really enjoyed following Herrera's schemes (and his remarkable "assistants," "Europe" and "Asia"), and learning about the French criminal, legal, and prison systems.

Finally, I was very disappointed that this Penguin edition did not have notes. There were many times when I had to resort to Wikipedia to look up a reference to people or works of literature, but many many more times when I didn't bother and just read without fully understanding what Balzac was trying to say. This is a novel that cries our for explanatory endnotes!

17. Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

It's been many many years since I read any Kundera, and many many years since this original Writers from the Other Europe edition landed on my TBR. I remember really liking the works by Kundera I read back in the 80s?/90s, but I had mixed feelings about this early volume of short stories, all focused on the sexual games people play. Some I found disturbing, such as "The Hitchhiking Game," in which a role-playing game goes a little too psychologically far, "Let the Old Dead Make Way for the New Dead," in which the lead male character ponders whether it's better to have a delightful memory or a less delightful reality, and "Symposium," a multi-voiced tale with some largely thoughtless cruelty. Some I found playful and thought-provoking, such as "Nobody Will Laugh," about a man who starts out playing a largely innocent joke which then spirals out of control, "Doctor Havel in Ten Years," which shows how our state of mind can affect reality, and "Edward and God," which satirizes both religion and atheism while showing what happens to a character who pretends belief to get a girl. The only one that I found both fun and charming, and my favorite (maybe because of the mood I'm in!) was "The Golden Apple of Continuing Desire," in which the chase is all.

In these stories, Kundera explores not only the largely male sexual psyche but also the implications of playing jokes or pretending to be someone else, probing identity. That's the part I appreciated. I also can't help but feel that some of the obsession of the characters with chasing (and getting) women helps relieve some of the political repression they are subject too (although this is almost, but not entirely, off stage in these stories). Of course Kundera has always focused on sex, mixed with philosophy, which I guess makes the sex high-minded. I think what I'm saying is that I liked Kundera better when I was younger.

18. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss

Born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku in the revolutionary year of 1905, and buried as Mohammed Essad Bey in Positano during the second world war, the writer who is the protagonist of this biography reveled in creating new identities and life stories for himself, but ultimately was trapped by the weight of geography and history. This book hadn't intrigued me when it first came out, but after reading Tom Reiss's The Black Count, I was eager to read this earlier work and I was not disappointed. Reiss became interested in Nussimbaum when he traveled to Baku to write an article about oil and was introduced to the novel Ali and Nino, written by someone named Kurban Said, said to be the best book to read about the place; who Kurban Said was was a mystery, a mystery which led him to research the life of Nussimbaum/Bey.

And quite a life it was. His father was a an oil millionaire in Baku, but father and son had to flee across the Caucusus after the 1917 revolution, with quite dramatic adventures along the way, adventures made even more dramatic by Nussimbaum/Bey when he wrote about them. (His mother, a revolutionary, had killed herself earlier.) As a child, and especially after this flight, young Lev became interested in what we would now call the multicultural but then was called, often derogatorily, cosmopolitan nature of the region, with Jews, Muslims, Azeris, Russians, and more interacting in business and in the streets. He became especially intrigued by Turkish culture in particular, and came to invent a Turkish and Persian heritage for himself.

Along with other emigrés from Soviet Russia, Lev and his father moved around Europe from Paris to Berlin, eventually becoming poor. Lev invented his Essad Bey persona, began to write nonfiction, and hung out with a literary crowd. Having grown up with the turmoil and danger of revolution, he had strong anti-revolutionary politics and even flirted with fascism. Later, he began to write fiction, married, visited the US, was divorced, and started writing fiction. Here is where the mystery of the name Kurban Said comes in. Eventually fleeing Nazi Berlin, he landed for a while in Vienna, then in Italy, where he became very sick and died, known in Positano only as "the Muslim."

Even more interesting than Nussimbaum's strange and sad story is the background Reiss provides on the times, places, and events. From the oil boom days in Baku to the cultures of the Caucasus, from the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events in Berlin in the 20s and 30s to the lives of the emigré population in Paris and Berlin, from the fascination of the west with "eastern" culture to the effects of the Nazi takeover of publishing, and more, he brings compelling and (to me) little known history to life. As with his later biography, this one also reads like a novel, but Reiss conducted extensive interviews, read primary sources, and includes detailed notes and a lengthy biography.

19. The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ouřednik

This delightful and thought-provoking novel tells the tale of a "free" settlement of anarchists and others in the Brazilian wilderness in 1855. It starts with a 1902 letter from the now old Italian anarchist who planned these Fraternitas settlements to a woman has always loved; it is full of high-flown language about principles of love and freedom and anarchism, interspersed with some regret. The novel then goes back to 1855 and the diary of an Italian who set off on the journey to the new community.

The diary starts with the two-month sea voyage and the diarist, who we come to learn is named Bruno, is an acute observer of his fellow passengers, who include not only the Italian group but also some French communists, some very poor Germans, and various others, including some Slavs and some "Negro" workers. One of the group is a committed anarchist who believes in complete freedom; another believes they need to have leaders and structure and votes and "reprimands" and lots and lots of meetings. There also is a strong belief in "free love," which more or less amounts to sharing the women in the group, although the women have something to say about this too. Much of this is quite amusing, although fraught, because of the matter-of-fact way in which Bruno reports what's going on. He also becomes interested in a woman on the ship and discusses this most delicately. (Later on, she tells him that she would be willing to sleep with him but is sleeping with someone else because "first she had to get used to it.")

The diary starts again six months into the stay at the settlement, and things have not gone according to plan. Although the reader doesn't realize it ta first, Bruno will tell the story of what has happened and what is happening in several different ways, so the reader doesn't know which is the truth, or if in some way all of them are.

I didn't quite know what to expect when I started this book, but it seems to me that besides being a well-told and intriguing story, it is a meditation on the conflict of ideals and desires -- desires for love, for control, for money -- and a satire as well. And it also could be a comment on some of the more horrific aspects of 20th century history, as when one of the characters thanks "everyone who had voted for the strictest sanction (i.e., execution) and hadn't let themselves be appeased by unconvincing excuses, because humanity is more important than individual human life." And, in one version of what happened to the settlement, Bruno notes that "Individual freedom has been temporarily suspended because it turns out that people aren't ripe for it yet, although it remains our goal in consideration of the fact that it's the first requirement of harmonious development."

But this is the opposite of a dogmatic book. It wears its thoughts lightly and is a fun, if serious, novel.

Thanks for that review of the orientalist. It's been on my bookshelf for a long time. Your excellent review has moved it up the stack considerably.

Rebecca, are you reading all the human comedy novels? By the way, I appreciate your commentary on "A harlot..."

Thanks, Judy. As I said in my review, it hadn't intrigued me until I read Reiss's The Black Count, and then I was ready for anything he wrote.

Thanks, Manuel. No, I have no intention of reading all of The Human Comedy. It's enough that I'm trying to read all of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series that are in recent English translation! I've been reading Balzac because he's the first quarter author in the Author Theme Reads group, and I'll probably get back to him at some point, but I'm not crazy enough to try to read all of THC!

Wonderful review of Lost Illusions, Rebecca. You do make me want to give Balzac a try.

20. War and War by László Krasznahorkai

This is an amazing novel, and unlike anything else I have ever read. It is amazing in its layers of story, its ideas, and its writing style, which consists of sections, often several pages long, each containing only one long sentence.

Korin, through whose mind we see most of the novel, is a former archivist in a town outside Budapest who, for reasons we don't know at first, has come to Budapest as the first leg of a journey to New York City, which he views as the center of the world. He is a man at the very least obsessed -- obsessed with his discovery in the midst of the archives of a manuscript that he believes will change the world, as well as with his own thoughts -- but also possibly quite deranged. His goal, once he gets to New York, is to type the entire manuscript and upload it to the internet so it will live forever, and then kill himself. But that is only the scaffolding on which this novel is hung.

Through Kraznahorkai's writing style, the reader gets inside Korin's mind, as well as the mind of the various other characters he encounters, from a gang of preteen criminals to a former beauty queen flight attendant to a security guard and an interpreter at JFK airport, and more. Mostly, though it is Korin's mind, and the thoughts and ideas just pour out of him in the form of seemingly endless sentences. Much of what he thinks about, and talks about, is the content of the manuscript, chapter by chapter.

And what is this manuscript about? On the surface, it is the story of four companions (Kasser, Bengazza, Falke, and Toót), possibly spies, possibly soldiers, definitely experts in defensive strategies, who appear and reappear in different historical times and places, from Crete on the eve of the volcanic eruption that destroyed Minoan civilization, to Cologne in the late 1800s, on the verge of a war with France, when the building of the cathedral was nearing completion (after having been left unfinished for centuries), to Venice, to Hadrian's Wall at the edges of the Roman empire in Britain (and apparently simultaneously in Portugal in 1493, awaiting the return of Columbus), and more. At each place, a mysterious man named Mastemann appears, and then disappears, seemingly involved in some imminent catastrophe. As I was struggling to figure out what this was all about, I reached this same questioning in Korin's narrative:

and beside that, why, in any case -- Korin's agitation was evident in his expression -- does he describe four characters with such extraordinary clarity then insert them at certain historical moments, and why precisely one moment rather than another, why precisely these four and not some other people; and what is this fog, this miasma, out of which he leads them time after time; and what is the fog into which he drives them; and why the constant repetition; and how does Kasser disappear at the end; and what is this perpetual, continuous secrecy about, and the ever more nagging impatience, increasing chapter on chapter, to discover who Mastemann is, and why each episode concerning him follows the same pattern, as does the narrative too; and, most important of all, why does the writer go completely mad, whoever he is . . ." p.202

As the novel progresses, Kraznohorkai provides a little more, a very little more, of Korin's background, which explains perhaps, his knowledge of history (I, on the other hand, was driven to Wikipedia and Google Translate many times throughout Korin's retelling of the manuscript). It seems that Korin is obsessed by the idea of borders between "civilization" and "barbarians," by the ends of certain phases of history and lost cultures, by the idea of someone evil (the devil?) pulling the strings without being seen, by art as the antidote to money, and by the dangerous idea of money representing goods instead of the goods themselves. But what this all means is as much a mystery to me as it apparently is to Korin.

In Korin's "real" life, as opposed to the fantasy world of the "manuscript" (which comes to seem to be a creation of Korin's imagination), he encounters people who help him (such as the flight attendant in Budapest), but a lot more people who are up to no good, including his mercurial and violent (to his girlfriend) Hungarian landlord; life in the modern world is brutal. He also constantly and endlessly tells otherl people what he is thinking about and what is going on in the manuscript, despite the fact that they completely ignore him (either because they don't understand Hungarian, like the landlord's Puerto Rican girlfriend) or because he appears mad.

Nonetheless, despite all this, Korin is a sympathetic character; he is clearly suffering, as well as mad. When he begins to get some sense of what the "manuscript" is all about, he thinks:

he, in his dense, stupid, unhealthy way had managed to grasp nothing, but nothing of it in the last few days, and the mysterious, cloudy, origins of the text, its powerful poetic energy, and the way it turned its back in the most decided manner on normal literary conventions governing such works, had deafened and blinded him, in fact as good as blasted him out of existence, like having a cannon fired at you, he said and shook his head, although the answer was right there in front of him all the time and he should have seen it, did in fact see it, and, furthermore, admired it, but had failed to understand it, failed to understand what he was looking at and admiring, meaning that the manuscript was interested in one thing only, and that was reality explored to the point of madness, and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition into the imagination was, and he meant this literally, Korin explained, as if the writer had written the text not with pen and words but with his nails, scratching the text into the paper and into the mind, all the details, repetitions and intensifications making the process of reading more difficult, while the details it gave, the lists it repeated and the material it intensified was etched into the brain forever . . ." p. 174

Of course, if a book is entitled War and War, one thinks immediately of War and Peace. At first I found this puzzling, because at first there seemed to be no war in this book. But it becomes clearer that Korin perceives the world to be in a state of endless war, although peace is described as "the greatest, the highest, the supreme achievement of man," with the world of beauty represented here and there in the "manuscript" gone forever. In fact, there was a lot of beauty in some of the descriptions. I've only scratched the surface of this remarkable book, and I feel there was a lot that went by me as I read it. It is a challenging book to read, but well worth it.

As a final note, there were a few minor points that annoyed me because they were errors about New York City. For example, nobody arriving at JFK Airport in 1997 had to leave the plane by stairs and take a bus to the terminal as Korin does; the street in upper Manhattan is Fort Washington Avenue, not Washington Avenue; and Puerto Ricans are US citizens and do not have to cross illegally into the US without ID. But these, as I say, are small in the context of the whole.

Nice review of War and War. I am intrigued.

Great review. Sounds very interesting, but page(s) long sentences? hmmm.

Thanks, Rhonda and Peg. Peg, I found the long sentences challenging at first, but after a while I got used to them. They are full of commas and semicolons, so they are pretty easy to navigate.

21. Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia

This beautifully written novella starts off as a straightforward crime story. Varga, a district attorney trying a highly publicized case, has been killed in a place that is and isn't Sicily, and Rogas, the "shrewdest investigator," is sent to figure it out without finding out anything that might make Varga look bad. Soon, judges are being murdered too, and Rogas does what any smart and savvy detective would do: he tries to find connections among the victims, specifically trying to find innocent people who were convicted by Varga and one ore more of the judges. Although he finds someone he considers highly likely to have committed the crimes, complications ensue because some "witnesses" saw "revolutionaries" running away after one judge was shot, and the powers that be, for their own reasons, attach themselves to this idea and demote Rogas to working with the political department of the police. And then Rogas sees how there are all sorts of connections among the powerful from all backgrounds.

For this novel is masquerading as a police story. It is a story of collusion and collaboration and corruption at the highest levels, mixed in with philosophical comments and literary quotes and allusions. It is a satire of sorts, and Sciascia has a wonderful sly, pointed wit. For example, when another character comments that a revolutionary group is shrinking, Rogas points out that all its members are spending the summer at their parents' country homes or on their yachts, and that the only group members left are the poor ones. At another point, Rogas is talking to the minister responsible for the police, and notes that he thinks they have gone off on the wrong track in the investigation; the minister looks at Rogas "with sympathy and suspicion" and replies, "Perhaps. But right or wrong, stay on it. Stay on it." Other high spots include Rogas's visit to a noted author who is embittered because an earnest revolutionary is staying at their villa as a guest of his wife, and his visit to the chief judge who believes a miscarriage of justice is impossible in the same way that the failure of transubstantiation in a Catholic service is impossible.

The ending, perhaps to be expected, is also both shocking and bleak. Sciascia's note at the end of the book says about it that "I kept this fable in a drawer in my desk for two years. Why? I don't know, but this could be one explanation: I began to write it with amusement, and at the end I was no longer amused." Those are the very feelings of the reader, at least this one.

I love your reviews Rebecca, keep 'em coming! I just envy (in a good way) your writing ability.

What Manuel said.

I am another who reads your reviews charmed, engrossed, slightly awed by your dissection of the essentials of what you have just read. I rarely fail to take note of any books you read that I haven't, unless you advise not to of course.

Have a lovely Sunday. x

Thanks, Manuel, Darryl, and Paul. I'm blushing (a little bit).

You read the gutsiest stuff and then write beautifully about it.

For example, when another character comments that a revolutionary group is shrinking, Rogas points out that all its members are spending the summer at their parents' country homes or on their yachts, and that the only group members left are the poor ones. You sold me on it with this comment. There have been plenty of wealthy people who have come into power by aligning themselves with and hiding amongst the poor or working class.

Thanks, Tui, and you are so right, cammmykitty, but in this case the implication was that they were fashionably revolutionary when it suited them and happy to enjoy the fruits of their families' wealth when it suited them.

22. To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia

Thanks to reading Sciascia's Equal Danger, I discovered that I'd had this novella on my shelves for almost five years. And I liked it even better. Sciascia takes his epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe: "Let it not be supposed that I am detailing any mystery, or penning any romance." And indeed, while the protagonist, an educated but not street-wise schoolteacher, who still lives with his mother, earnestly tracks down clues to the double murder of a pair of hunting buddies, a doctor and a pharmacist, and becomes enamored of the doctor's beautiful widow, the reader develops his or her own suspicions and, in the end, it turns out almost everyone else in the Sicilian town knew what was going on all along.

For, like Equal Danger, this is a story only masquerading as a mystery. But it was even more enjoyable for me because, in addition to Sciascia's wonderful writing style and his pointed wit, this novel involves more complex and interesting characters, is more indirect in its indictment of the breadth of corruption, collusion, and complicity, and provides a broader portrait of many aspects of Sicilian society, including politics, the Church, and sex. I can't resist quoting this comment about the schoolteacher's reluctance to help turn in a guilty person, one among many that are both thoroughly delightful and eminently quotable:

"Laurana had a a kind of obscure pride that made him decisively reject the idea that just punishment should be administered to the guilty one through any intervention of his. His had been a human, intellectual curiosity that could not, and should not be confused with the interest of those whom society and State paid to capture and consign to the vengeance of the law persons who transgress or break it. At play in this obscure pride were the centuries of contempt that an oppressed people, an eternally vanquished people, had heaped on the law and all those who were its instrument; a conviction, still unquenched, held that the highest right and truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or God, can only come from the barrels of a gun." p.120

Thanks for bringing Sciascia to my notice, hopefully my library will have one or both of these books. Your touchstone above for To Each his Own links through to a different book.

Oh thanks, I thought I fixed them all, but I'll fix this one now. The books I have are NYRB editions.

23. The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia

In a small town in Sicily,Salvatore Colasberna is shot as he is boarding a bus at 6 in the morning. Like the fritter-seller in the square, the bus passengers all melt into the background, so nobody saw anything when the police arrive to investigate. " 'Why,' asked the fritter-seller, astonished and inquisitive, has there been a shooting?' "

Captain Bellodi, a northerner from Parma assigned to Sicily, a man more thoughtful, educated, and sensitive than his Sicilian colleagues, takes charge of the investigation, which soon includes two more murders, and soon concludes that these murders are not only related but also mafia-related. Of course, nobody else believes there is a mafia; surely they must somehow be crimes of passion. As the novella proceeds, the course of the investigation is interrupted by conversations between unnamed people -- His Excellency, the Minister, and so on. The reader sees the web of complicity, even without knowing how these people are or how they are connected.

Captain Bellodi himself is a fascinating character, a police officer who unnerves the people he is questioning by being courteous with them, a man who ponders the nature of the Sicilian character, a dedicated officer of the law who is pleased when the mafia chief he is questioning (or really having a discussion with) calls him a "man" (his highest form of praise) and responds in kind. He is eventually sent back home to Parma to participate in a trial there; while he is away, the case he has carefully developed falls apart. Nonetheless, after first feeling more at home in Parma, Bellodi realizes he loves Sicily and will return "Even if it's the end of me."

This is the third Sciascia crime novel I've read and, as with the others, it is much more than that. It is a portrait of Sicily in the early 1960s, it has deft, insightful characterizations, and Sciascia's wonderfully oblique, understated, yet perceptive writing.

24. It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter

Since I read a lot of Soviet-era history and fiction, this book intrigued me when I spotted it in a bookstore, but I ended up having mixed feelings about it. When Satter concentrates on history and journalism, he presents an informative and chilling details about how contemporary Russians have responded to the horrors of Stalinist purges, executions, and slave labor. But when he ventures into speculation about the reasons for Russian lack of concern, specifically Russian "character," I found myself wishing he had stuck to what he could justify.

Throughout the book, Satter focuses on memorials to the victims of Soviet terror, specifically the dearth of them, as a proxy for Russian commitment to understanding their past. He begins with a look at efforts to memorialize in the early days after the demise of the Soviet Union, and moves on to locations near Moscow and St. Petersburg where thousands upon thousands of people were shot and "buried" in mass graves. The successors to the KGB and NKVD have been reluctant to confirm these killing sites despite pleas from the descendents of victims and the nonprofit group Memorial which accompanied Satter on many of his trips.

Satter moves on to discussions of the appeal of communism, the responsibility of the state (for "rehabilitating" previously convicted people), moral choice under totalitarianism (not a very deeply developed chapter), and the roots of the communist past, before turning to examine the Russian response to the Katyn revelations (in addition to the some 20,000 Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia who were "buried" their after their massacre, the forest also held the bodies of murdered Soviet citizens), the changes that have taken place in Vorkuta, the arctic site of one of the harshest camps in the Gulag, and the Russian treatment of a KGB agent who also worked for the CIA and was outed by Aldrich Ames.

Basically Satter's argument is that when the Soviet Union fell, Russians felt some urge to memorialize the victims of Stalinist oppression. But through a combination of the reluctance of the FSB (the KGB successor) to investigate its past, economic woes, and a Russian "preference" for a strong state, as well as the age of the descendents of the victims, they have not exhibited a strong urge for the kind of self-examination and ongoing remembrance that, say, the Germans have done for their Nazi past. Much of the book also felt repetitive. While I do believe it honors the victims to describe exactly what happened and how people have responded to this knowledge, it got a little tiresome when Satter then describes how only Memorial is interested in creating memorials and how they are thwarted. There is apparently more interest in creating monuments to the communist past than memorials to its victims.

Nonetheless, much of what Satter described was interesting. For example, in the far northern regions, where the post-Stalinist Russian government enticed miners and other workers by paying them extra, those new workers were glorified as "heroes of the North" and didn't want to think about how the regions had originally been developed by gulag slave laborers. It also seemed that when many people remembered the communist past, they were thinking of how they were taken care of as workers, and how the Soviet Union was a powerful and respected nation, and not about Stalinist terror. (In fact, in this book, Satter seems to conflate Stalinist terror with all of communism; a better subtitle would have been "Russia and the Stalinist past".) And I was discouraged to learn that Solzhenitsyn blames "the Jews" for much of the Stalinist evil.

In the end, I felt informed by a lot of the book. It's just that when I get to statements like the one I quote below, I feel uneasy about how Satter generalizes about national culture, and I sense a whiff of ideology:

"Russia differs from the West in its attitude towards the individual. In the West, the individual is treated as an end in himself. His life cannot be disposed of recklessly in the pursuance of political schemes, and recognition of its value imposes limits on the behavior of the authorities. In Russia, the individual is seen by the state as a means to an end, and genuine moral framework for political life does not exist. The result is that the weight of a lawless state apparatus is slowly destroying Russia's immense human potential, rendering the country's authoritarian stability precarious. Russia has little protection from a recurrence of murderous political fanaticism that, under normal circumstances, would be rejected immediately in the West." pp. 304-305

While much of this may be true, Satter just pulls it out of a hat. If he wanted to draw those kinds of conclusions, he should have written a different book, one that analyzed Russian political thought and behavior. These kinds of conclusions seem grafted on to a book which, in its history and journalism, tells an important and depressing tale.

25. The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz

What a poetic novel this is, perhaps not surprisingly so since Milosz is a poet, and a Nobel Prize-winning one at that. At least partly autobiographical, the novel is at once a coming-of-age story, a paean to nature, a study of character, a history of Lithuania, and a portrait of a rural, largely pre-industrial world that was soon to be utterly destroyed. Milosz was born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire) in 1911, but his family had for several generations spoken Polish, and while he was fluent in both languages (as well as several others), he considered himself a Polish poet and wrote in Polish.

In the novel, young Thomas has been sent to live with his maternal grandparents in the Issa Valley, a remote area in Lithuania that is filled with lakes and forests, as his father is fighting with some army (either the Russians or the Poles, who are fighting each other) and his mother is stranded over the border; his paternal grandmother is also living there. He is probably about 9 or 10 when the novel begins, but his age isn't specified until much later. The family was previously better off than it is now, but they own a "manor" house and quite a bit of land, including forests. Later on, this puts them slightly at odds with some of the local population who, inspired no doubt by what little bits of information they have heard about the Russian revolution, are itching for land distribution.

It is probably a lonely time for Thomas, and he first finds comfort in his grandfather's library, discovering books that had been gathering dust on the shelves for decades. Later he becomes completely enamored by nature, learning first about plants and then about birds, loving both his observations of them in their habitats and their names and the whole Linnean naming system. Eventually he meets a neighboring landowner who initiates Thomas into hunting. At first, Thomas is very proud to be included with the grown men, and is fascinated by how hunters creep through the woods, call to birds, and set their dogs to work. Everything about the way Milosz describes the forests and the animals is utterly lyrical. Ultimately, Thomas finds it difficult to kill the birds and other animals they are hunting.

But this novel is about much more than Thomas, and the voice of the novel is not Thomas's but someone who is able to see all of the society of the little town of Gine and its surroundings. The reader sees many of the inhabitants of the area, including the priest who is having an affair with his housekeeper (who comes back to haunt the town), a tormented forester, a bitter and cruel but persuasive poor boy, the local priests, and many others, and gains some knowledge of their histories and characters. Thomas's family is also explored: his maternal grandfather tells him about Lithuanian history, his paternal grandmother meditates on her own life story and her husband and sons, and his mother's sister, his aunt Helen, enjoys some extramarital adventures. The portrait Milosz paints of Thomas's paternal grandmother is particularly rich, and the scene where she is dying is one of the most beautiful and insightful I have read. At the same time, the novel is rich with the spirits, both good and evil, that people still believe guide the residents of the Issa Valley. All in all, this novel is poetry in prose, with much left unsaid.

I was eager to read Milosz after I read My Century, in which Milosz interviews Aleksander Wat, a Polish poet of an earlier generation, and Lisa (labfs39) recommended this novel. I'm glad she did, I'm glad I read it, and I will look for more of Milosz's work.

79: It was here that the most striking anachronism, for me, was the tremendous efforts people put into trying to reach others by phone -- landlines (albeit with video), that is. Obviously when this was written in the early 90s, the ubiquity of mobile phones was unimaginable.
I was less forgiving about the missed connections with Blackout / All Clear, which were published in 2010 / 2011.

Wow, I had to stop and think which review that quote came from! I'll definitely stay away from the two Willis books you mention -- that would be beyond irritating!

26. Smile As They Bow by Nu Nu Yi

Well, the best thing about this novella was the picture it painted of an unfamiliar (to me) culture, specifically the festivals honoring nats (or spirits) in Taungbyon, Burma, and the natkadaws, or spirit wives, now mostly transvestites but historically women, who "embody" the spirits and make and distribute a lot of money in the process. Through the thoughts and actions of the primary character, a transvestite known as Daisy Bond, as well as those of several secondary characters, the reader sees how the natkadaws acquire and manage their followers, largely wealthy women, who shower them with gifts and money so the spirits they channel will bring them even more wealth and success; the competition for placement in the processions to the various temples over the course of the seven-day festival; the difficulties of aging; the struggles of the poor through begging and through actually being sold to wealthier people; and the way the festival has started attracting tourists from all over, as well as all those who would like to make money from them, including trinket-sellers and pickpockets.

All of this is interesting in an anthropological way, but as a story it bordered on the soap-operaish. It was also interesting to have a picture of life in Burma/Myanmar apart from the political oppression that is more familiar to those of us in the west. Nu Nu Yi is apparently a popular and prolific writer in Burma/Myanmar, but this is her only work to have been translated into English; it was short-listed for the Man Asia literary prize.

Needless to say, I have no familiarity with Burmese, and the translation, by another Burmese woman and a man who has spent a lot of time there, seemed generally OK to me. But I was struck by references to people born on certain days of the week, which apparently has some astrological or zodiacal significance, because they used our western names for the days. I looked this up on Wikipedia, and there is a correlation between the Burmese system and our system, but I found the use of western names for the days jarring and would have preferred the translators to keep the Burmese words as they did for various other spirit-related terminology.

For more information on nats and nat festivals, see this Wikipedia article. I also note on the web that there are quite a few travel agencies offering trips to the Taungbyon festival. There's no business like (religious) show business!

27. The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant

Surprisingly, since he is considered a master of the short story and one of the earliest "modern" short story writers, I had never read any of Maupassant's stories before. The collection I read includes a varied selection, enough to give an idea of the breadth of his topics and to show Maupassant's ability to briefly but brilliantly depict places and people, including providing deep insight into their psychology. When I read the first two stories, I thought their endings were a little predictable, but I then realized that this is probably because I've read a lot of more recent stories and these endings were likely to have been novel plot twists when Maupassant wrote them.

Although the stories are varied, several themes and situations recur: Maupassant has a fondness for writing about prostitutes and for showing the hypocrisy of bourgeois society; he also often depicts French reactions to their occupation by Prussian soldiers in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. Most of the tales in this collection take place in the Normandy countryside and towns, although a few take place in Paris, or elsewhere, including one chilling one (in more than one sense) in the Alps. Several of the stories, most notably "The Entity (The Horla)," have what might be called a hint of the supernatural, although I read "The Entity" as a compelling tale of a descent into madness, rather than of a haunting.

Among my favorite stories, in addition to "The Entity (The Horla)," were "Butterball" and "The Tellier House" (both featuring prostitutes and bourgeois hypocrisy), "The Water" (for its wonderful depiction of a fog-shrouded river and a man's reaction to being trapped there), "Mademoiselle Fifi" (more prostitutes and the comeuppance of the Prussian occupiers), "The Inn" (for the snowy setting, another descent into madness, and the inspiration for "The Shining"), "The Hand" (for its utter creepiness), and "A Day in the Country" (for the amazing description of the nightingale singing and what this description is standing in for).

I do have two reservations, one about Maupassant and one about the translation. Despite his fondness for prostitutes (literarilly, that is), Maupassant doesn't seem to like women much; at least, he frequently makes quite disparaging comments about them (although, to be fair, men don't come off so well either). And the translation, although it generally seemed very readable to me, jarred me when the translator used contemporary or near-contemporary slang, like "wow" and "lucky stiff" and more. I realize it's a challenge for a translator when a writer uses slang, but if it's an older work I'd rather he tried to use older expressions even if they're harder to understand.

Wonderful review of The Necklace and Other Tales.

Thanks, lit_chick, and thanks for stopping by!

I remember reading "The Necklace" back in high school and loving it. I'm pretty sure that I've re-read that short story since then, but it's been a long time, but I can still remember it.

Somehow I managed to get through high school English and French without reading Maupassant, but have no idea how!

English I could see, but French?? that does surprise me. His short stories are quite wonderful, if occasionally a little like O'Henry.

28. Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, and a long train trip yesterday proved the perfect opportunity. I found it moderately entertaining and moderately charming, with its strongest points being the narrator's digressions that provide sly insight into human nature. It is in these episodes that a novel that seems rooted in the occupations and preoccupations of the late 19th century instead sheds light on people today. Plus ça change . . .

The plot is slight. Three young men who work (or "work") at clerk-type jobs in London (to say nothing of the dog, Montmorency) embark on a boating trip up the Thames to Oxford and back as a way to cure their psychological malaise and hypochondriacal obsessions. Light on action, the book shines in its digressions, some extremely humorous (and others less so -- I am not the biggest fan of British humor, nor of slapstick humor). Some of my favorites are the narrator's conviction he suffers from all diseases except housemaid's knee after reading a medical tome (Google anyone?), his uncle's method of hanging a picture, the story of the mounted fish, the narrator's opinions on the sightseeing compulsion and on weather forecasting, and his varying perspective depending on whether he is in a skiff or a steam-launch. I also enjoyed the author's parodies of lyrical nature writing, and the British history he throws in, and Montmorency's antics. Almost hidden by the humor are some more serious points, including a woman found dead in the water and some comments on overconsumption. Above all, Jerome is a deft writer, and I enjoyed the way he moved the story along and some of his throwaway comments.

I have to say I was put off at one point by the use of a derogatory racial term; although I attributed it to the times, I was shocked to see the author of the introduction to my edition use the same term without comment in the notes section. However, he also points out in the introduction that Jerome, after a trip to the US, wrote harshly about lynching, so I guess this is more complicated than it seems.

I read this recently too, and was underwhelmed, considering it is regarded as such a classic. Maybe the British deadpan was too tiresome for me. But at least I know what it is now.

Same here, Judy; it was a pleasant and light read, but I was also underwhelmed by it.

29. Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough

I bought this book after hearing an intriguing interview with the author on my local public radio station. Many of the topics he discusses are fascinating and thought-provoking, but I found the book tiresome in some respects. Specifically, rather than focusing on the scientific evidence, Fernyhough mixes in a lot of personal stories, some in much more detail (especially at the beginning of the book) than I would have liked. He also includes quotes from novels, which I found much more engaging. But the personal stories and digressions, which Fernyhough no doubt would claim bring to life some of the points he is trying to make, gave me the feeling that he was trying to enlarge what could have been a long article into a reasonably sized book. Could have been just me.

Fernyhough's topic is what he calls autobiographical memory, our memories of what happened to us. He distinguishes semantic memory, or the memory of facts, from episodic memory, or the memory of events. As he writes, "Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory." (pp. 12-13) That is, I know (semantic memory) that I was in kindergarten when I had my tonsils out, but I remember and can picture myself (episodic memory) having ice cream for breakfast afterwards. (See, I can use personal examples too!) He also distinguishes between conscious or explicit memory and unconscious or implicit memory.

So what are some of his most interesting points? The biggest one is that we do not actually store memories in a complete form in our brains. Instead, every time we recall something we are recreating that memory not just from what we "remember" but from the perspective of who we are today and of all the other times we have recalled that memory. Each time we remember something we are adding to the way we will remember it the next time; in essence, we construct a memory anew each time we access it. Another point I found fascinating is that the brain structures that are involved in memory are also involved in thinking about the future (which Fernyhough points out are both imaginative processes) and that one evolutionary role of memory may have been to help us plan for the future.

Fernyhough covers a variety of other topics, all related to "new research in cognitive neuroscience the discipline that integrates findings from experimental psychology, neuroimaging and neuropsychology (studies of brain damage)." (pp. 14-15) Specifically, he discusses how our senses, especially smell and hearing, trigger memories; at what age children start having autobiographical memories, and whether this is related to their ability to express them; how we can remember things completely wrong, or things that never happened; traumatic memories, whether they are more likely to be accurate, and how they might be minimized if they become obsessive; why our memories are strongest of our late teenage and early adult years; and what happens to our memory as we age.

There's a lot that's worth reading in this book; I just found it annoying to have to read so much about Fernyhough and his family. For those who want to skip the book, but get the main ideas, check out this link to the radio program I heard.

30. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

I had a lot of fun reading this book and can't believe I've taken so long to read it it. Gogol, who called it a poem and not a novel, thinking of it, as the introduction to my edition points out, as a minor epic, takes his decidedly non-heroic hero, Chichickov, and the reader, through a series of encounters that humorously (and perhaps not so humorously) illustrate life in provincial Russia. It is wildly satirical and often laugh-out-loud funny, and yet there is probably much more than a kernel of truth in the characters he creates. Through these characters, and his delicious use of language, Gogol keeps the reader wondering who Chichikov will meet next, who he really is, and why he is doing what he is doing -- just as the people who meet him wonder about him.

For what Chichikov is doing is going around the countryside, always impressing people with his appearance and manner, and trying to buy "dead souls" -- serfs who have died but who remain on the tax rolls of their masters until the next census, thus representing an expense to their masters. Clearly, this is unusual, if not downright illegal, and the reader doesn't know until the last chapter of the first part why Chichikov is doing it. Everywhere, people are charmed to meet him, and he makes inroads into the cream of provincial society, but of course he encounters obstacles and, despite his resourcefulness, eventually serious enough ones to make him leave town. In the second part of the book, which is unfinished and incomplete (Gogol burned a lot of it just before his untimely death), some years have passed, Chichikov is in another part of the country, engaging in other schemes and meeting other odd characters; however, this part doesn't have the manic energy of the first part.

What we see in the people Chichikov encounters is a cross-section of provincial Russia: corruption, greed, mismanagement, suspicion, cruelty, the desire to do good without knowing how, class distinctions, downright nuttiness, and absurdity. It is clearly a society that could be doing a lot better than it is. One of the weirdest sections involved a landowner Chichikov meets (in the unfinished second part) who has organized a whole bureaucracy on his estate, one that needless to say doesn't work, and that sounds a lot like the Soviet bureaucracy that wouldn't come on the scene for another 70 or 80 years.

It's hard to say whether the best part of this book is the characters, the satire, or Gogol's language. As he writes:

A knowledge of hearts and a wise comprehension of life resound in the word of the Briton; like a nimble fop the short-lived word of the Frenchman flashes and scatters; whimsically does the German contrive his lean, intelligent work, not accessible to all; but there is no word so sweeping, so pert, so bursting from beneath the very heart, so ebullient and vibrant with life, as an aptly spoken Russian word." p. 109

And to give a feeling for Gogol's sometimes understated satire:

"Not hindered, however, by the lawyer's skeptical appearance, Chichikov explained the difficult points of the matter and depicted in alluring perspective the gratitude necessarily consequent about good counsel and concern.

To this the lawyer responded by depicting the uncertainty of all earthly things, and artfully alluded to the fact that two birds in the bush meant nothing, and what was needed was one in the hand. p. 360

I could go on and on, but I'll just note that the edition I read was translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose translations of other Russian authors I have also thoroughly enjoyed. There is an even newer translation, published by NYRB (whose books I nearly always like), but I decided to stick with the tried and true. If I had all the time in the world, it would be interesting to compare the translations.

Great review of Dead Souls, Rebecca. I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed it, as I received it as part of my NYRB subscription last year. I'll move it higher on my TBR list.

I loved Dead Souls, too, Rebecca. Having not read him before, I was surprised by the humor and sheer enjoyability of the book. I had a good time with it. Nice review!

Thanks, Darryl and Joe. Darryl, I debated getting the NYRB edition, but decided to stick with the edition translated by translators I've read a lot of before.

31. An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman

I became an admirer of Vasily Grossman when I read his magnificent and tragic Life and Fate, and continued on with his other works of fiction and reportage, all in NYRB editions. (I also have, but have not yet read, his A Writer at War.) Grossman not only lived through some of the worst horrors of the 20th century, but also, as a reporter attached to the Red Army, saw many of them first-hand, including being one of the first to enter Trebiinka. His writing shines with diamond-sharp clarity, and with a pervasive humanity.

Thus I was happy to read this much more personal account of two months Grossman spent, at the beginning of the 1960s and towards the end of his life, in Armenia. Although Stalin had died, the KGB had recently confiscated his manuscript of Life and Fate and, perhaps as something of a consolation prize, he was given the task of editing a literal translation of an Armenian book. So he went to Armenia, and in this brief volume he tells some of his impressions of Armenia and some of what he did there, and meditates on the meaning of nations, villages, Russian stoves,and -- above all -- what is good. The original title of this book was a Russian translation of an Armenian greeting: Barev dzez, or "Good to you."

I found much of this book very moving. Grossman is not afraid to share his personal thoughts and feelings, while the journalist in him observes the rocky environment of Armenia, the haunted look of the sheep (who become, in a way, stand-ins for the millions killed by Stalin and Hitler), differences in how people express their religious feelings, a wedding in a remote mountain village, and much more. Through what is at first glance a travelogue, Grossman comments on some of the foremost questions of the 20th century and indeed of all time, including the impact of history, the continuity of humanity, and how we treat our fellow human beings. I feel the best way I can illustrate his approach is by quoting several of the many many many passages I marked in this book.

"One thing astonishes me. An old man or woman has only to raise their hand and a bus driver will stop for them; people here are kind an compassionate. Pretty young women walk along the pavement, clicking their thin high heels; dandies in hats lead sheep they have bought for the impending holiday; the sheep click their little hooves on the pavement, and the young women click their fashionable little heels; amid the fine buildings and the neon lights, the sheep smell their death" p. 24

"All of this leads me to think that this world of contradictions, of typing errors, of passages that are too long and wordy, of arid deserts, of fools, of camp commandants, of mountain peaks colored by the evening sun is a beautiful world. If the world were not so beautiful, the anguish of a dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than any other experience. That is why I feel such emotion, why I weep or feel overjoyed when I read or look at the works of other people who have brought together through love the truth of the eternal world and the truth of their mortal "I." " p. 80

"Nowhere else in Armenia, perhaps, have I seen such a stony desolation, impossible to escape from, as in the high valleys of Mount Aragats. I have no idea how to convey this improbable feeling. In three dimensions -- height, width, and depth -- stone, nothing but stone. No, there were more than three dimensions of stone; there was also an expression of the world's fourth coordinate -- time. The migrations of peoples, paganism, the ideas of Marx and Lenin, the wrath of the Soviet state had all found expression in this stone, in the basalt walls of churches, in gravestones, in elegantly built new clubs, in schools and palaces of culture, in quarries and mines, in the stone walls of labor camps. p. 99

32. The Sin of Father Mouret by Émile Zola

If Zola hadn't written this novel, I would not have finished it. And yet, in a way, I'm glad I did. Straying far from the realism for which he is justly famous, Zola enters the worlds of myth, fantasy, and hallucination. I can't say which I found more tedious: Father Mouret's adoration of first Mary and then the crucified Jesus, and his endless religious meditations, or the lush, absurdly detailed descriptions of every flower and plant imaginable when he is recuperating from some sort of breakdown in what can only be identified as the Garden of Eden.

Briefly, Serge Mouret (who is the brother of Octave Mouret of Pot Luck and The Ladies Paradise, and who, like him, is related to both the Rougons and the Macquarts), after being ordained as a priest, has been assigned to a tiny, remote Provençal village inhabited by a small group of peasants all of whom are related to each other. He lives next to the falling down church with his simple-minded sister Desirée, who is enchanted by her barnyard and its ever-growing population of farm animals, and an aging housekeeper who is always nagging him. The reader sees him performing various rites of the church, trying to convince a comparatively rich peasant to let his pregnant daughter marry the poorer father of her child, and, endlessly, fantasizing in what is almost a sexual way about Mary. His duties are interrupted when his uncle, a local doctor, takes him to the bedside of an atheistic man, who he erroneously believes is dying. The man is the caretaker of the abandoned Paradou, the former home of a rich lord with huge walled grounds and has taken in a young girl, a relative, Albine, who roams the grounds and has lost her former educated ways. Both the old caretaker and the girl are hated by the vicious local friar, Archangias. Later, when Father Mouret falls ill, apparently both physically, and mentally, his uncle takes him secretly to Paradou so Albine can care for him until he recovers. And it is there, in Paradou, riotously overgrown with every plant and animal, that Serge and Albine live an idyllic, natural life, watched over and led on by the trees and the flowers -- until they finally make love, and then know shame. Serge, once again Father Mouret, returns to the village and struggles with the knowledge of his sin -- and needless to say, things do not end well.

So, what on earth is Zola doing with this book? Influenced by the afterword written by the translator of the edition I read, I don't think it is just a criticism of the church, and it is not just a version of the biblical fall of man, although it certainly can be read that way. There is a lot of death in this book (and a lot of life), but it is clear that Zola is making the point that we all die, that it is natural to die, that nature is lush in the spring and summer but dies back in autumn and winter -- and that although we all die, life goes on. Certainly his love of religion perverted Father Mouret's humanity and love of Albine, and certainly Desirée's enjoyment of her animals and her barnyard are always a breath of fresh, if redolent, air, but the character of Albine, who is some ways is the heart of the story, remained mythical and unreal for me, and perhaps was meant to be. The most interesting thing I can say about this novel, which I almost put down many times, is that it made me think.

Nice reviews! I loved the quotes that you posted from Grossman. I have put his book on my wish list.

Great review of The Sin of Father Mouret, Rebecca!

Thanks, Rhonda and Darryl. Rhonda, for your interest in the Soviet Union, etc. , I would certainly recommend Grossman's novels, Life and Fate and Everything Flows.

Rebecca I enjoyed your latest triste with Zola (so to speak) and to have you confirm that even that sainted twister of tales was fallible.

Nice to see you here, Paul, and thanks. I find your threads a little daunting, but I promise to get back there one of these days.

33. Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin

I snapped up this novel, which I had never heard of, because of Patti Smith's enthusiastic introduction. Partly autobiographical, it begins when 19-year-old Anne escapes from prison by jumping over a wall, breaking her ankle in the process. (Astragalus is another name for the talus, or ankle bone.) After crawling to the road, she is rescued by Julien, who she soon realizes is a petty criminal himself, who takes her over a period of months to various homes where she can hide from the police while her ankle heals. Needless to say, she falls in love with him, and he with her, although they spend much time apart. (In real life, Albertine was married to Julien Sarrazin.)

So much for the plot. The novel is really the story of Anne, and how she finds her way in a world that has treated her badly and forced her into a life of crime, starting, we learn, with having been in some kind of girls' "reform" school. As she shuttles between other people's homes, people who take her in at Julien's request because they too can make some kind of use of her, she is wary and resourceful, and largely keeps to herself; eventually she goes off somewhat on her own, supporting herself through prostitution.

The novel is poetic in its way, and allusive, so the reader has to do a lot of reading between the lines. Nevertheless, it has a lot of power, largely because Anne is very proud and never thinks of herself as a victim. She is very descriptive of the physical pain and disability caused by her injury and the emotional pain caused by her love of Julien. She is perceptive about herself and about the people around her -- what they want, how they present themselves, how they make use of her -- a skill no doubt developed from having to look after herself from a a young age, as well as from having been in prison and around criminals, large and small. As she notes early on in the novel:

"Prison still surrounded me: I found it in my reflexes, the jumpiness, the stealth and the submissiveness of my reactions. You can't wash away overnight several years of clockwork routine and constant dissembling of self. When the body is turned loose, the mind, which up until then had been the only escape, becomes on the contrary the slave of mechanisms; the humility you used to fake turns into genuine embarrassment; me, one with all those loud mouths in there, I no longer dared, now, take the initiative in even the most natural of actions . . pp. 50-51

Or, as she says later, thinking of her relationship with Julien,

The road is as bare and harsh as a desert; later, perhaps calmly, we'll start down magic pathways . . . I used to be pampered, petted, fussed over, too, in the old days: I was intact and able to bite, my cupboard was full and my claws were ingenious.

My equipment was destroyed, I am wounded and begging, and it's I now who offers herself and clings; people don't hold onto me at all, for I have nothing to give them but myself, myself naked, and it will a lot of time and tenderness before some resource, some source springs up in me." p. 111

This book haunted me as I read it, and I don't feel able to really do it justice. I found the ending ambiguous and would be interested in discussing it with anyone else who has read the book.

Finally, I must add that the edition I read was seriously marred by sloppy editing. Some examples: "eyed' for "I'd" in the phrase "eyed balance myself on my new pin"; on the same page saying something happened on Saturdays and then on Sundays; "has acquire" instead of "has acquired"; and more. Very annoying and I would have expected better of New Directions.

34. To Say Nothing of the Dog; or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump At Last by Connie Willis

This was my second time travel novel by Connie Willis, and I found it much more entertaining than the previous one I read, Doomsday Book, even though I found its Victorian setting much less compelling than the medieval, plague-filled one of the earlier book. However, this one was put together much better, with less that seemed extraneous, and I was impressed both by Willis's characterization and with the way she wove together various time periods.

The book works on various levels as Ned Henry is sent back to Victorian era Oxford to attempt to fix an "incongruity," essentially the transport of something from the past to the present (2057, in this case) (ror vice versa) that doesn't belong there and that can alter the course of history, and a whole mess of complications ensue. The plot gives Willis the opportunity to satirize various aspects of Victorian (and contemporary) society, including class relationships, sexual hypocrisy, spiritualism, and jumble sales; set characters to arguing about what drives history, individual actions or impersonal events; discuss the Battle of Waterloo; illustrate the relationship of the bombing of Coventry Cathedral by the Nazis with British determination to keep their ability to decipher coded German military orders a secret; analyze several decades worth of British mystery novels; and observe various romances in progress. What pulls all of this together, and makes the book a page turner, are her wonderful characters (both two-footed and four-footed), her lively and often funny writing style, the meditations on the little things that change the course of history, and her pacing. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

>150 rebeccanyc:: That kind of sloppiness would drive me batty. You did well to read it in spite of that. And what a strange sounding tale.

I don't think it's probably your type of book, Tui, but thank you for stopping by. Fortunately, the sloppiness was more towards the second half of the book, so I was already invested in it. I think you would enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog, though.

I read To Say Nothing of the Dog earlier this year and then handed it off to my husband to read. We both enjoyed it immensely. I had been recommended it years ago when I asked someone for a scifi/fantasy recommendation for someone who doesn't read that genre. It was an excellent suggestion.

Nice review of To Say Nothing of the Dog, Rebecca. It doesn't sound like my kind of book, either.

I like your review of 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' and I pretty much agree with all of it. For this one and also 'Doomsday Book' , while I liked them I always felt a bit disoriented as I was reading them, as if pages got stuck together and I missed a bunch of plot points. I end up feeling as if I'm not quite sure what's happening or why, but I enjoy reading it anyway. That's just how her somewhat non-linear, non-sequitur-filled writing style affects me, I guess. I felt some of the same things when I read her 'Lincoln's Dream' but for whatever reason I liked that one a whole lot more.

I liked that review of To Say Nothing of the Dog, too, Rebecca, and thumbed it. Sounds like I enjoyed Doomsday Book a good bit more than you did, but I did think it was bloated and not as well-organized as TSNOTD.

No internet at the moment so typing on iPhone. Thanks for stopping by. I did enjoy Domesday but found parts of it frustrating. Liked the medieval setting better. More later.

35. Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant

Never has such a short novel seemed so long, unless I've blocked others out of my memory. I've spent days trying to figure out what to say about it, because de Maupassant is an excellent writer, but I just could not bring myself to care about the romantic torments of his protagonist, a rich young man with time on his hands named Mariolle, or the woman he becomes obsessed with, Madame de Burne, who seems to play with the emotions of men for fun. Furthermore, many of the characters in the novel say insulting and degrading things about women, although I suppose this only reflects the time and the place. This was a bleak novel in which the members of the upper classes, even when artists of various kinds, seem removed from the reality of life and spend their time playing at parties and affairs and gossip; the only people who seem to have a grasp on something substantive are a sculptor who enters the story only briefly and a young girl Mariolle meets when he flees to the country to try to forget Madame de Burne. I felt that I was experiencing some of the torment Mariolle felt by reading endlessly about his thoughts and feelings; all I can say is that Proust did this a lot better even though he did it at much greater length. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.

36. The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri

Having become addicted to Inspector Montalbano last year, I snapped up this latest of the series to be translated into English as soon as I saw it in a bookstore. But I wanted to save it for when I really needed a quick, fun, and diverting read, and that day came this week. It did not disappoint, as it is always a pleasure to be in the company of Montalbano and Camilleri's other continuing characters.

37. Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue is a marvelous writer and a great story-teller. She creates complex characters, provides fascinating historical details, explores interesting issues. And yet . . . and yet . . . even as I read this novel compulsively, I found myself resisting, and for some of the same reasons that Donoghue's Room also annoyed me. I find her writing a tad melodramatic and a tad manipulative. Yes, the protagonist, Mary, is a prostitute, so obviously she repeatedly engages in sex, and yest the sex is grim, mechanical, and joyless . . . but does the book need quite so many descriptions of it? Yes, Mary's life is hard, even when she temporarily escapes prostitution, but does the book need quite such explicit mentions of the place of women in the 18th century or couldn't we figure this out from the story? Do the men have to be so almost uniformly despicable (although complex)? Does it have to be so clear we're learning about the 19th century? I guess I'm just conflicted about easily I was sucked into this story!

Briefly, Mary is a poor girl of thirteen, living a hard life in London with her mother and stepfather, who, becoming entranced by a red ribbon, is raped by its vendor, becomes pregnant, is thrown out by her mother, and after being raped some more finds her way to a prostitute, Doll, who takes care of her until she is well enough to make her own living as a prostitute. Even as we see the hardships of this life, Mary delights in her freedom. Becoming ill, she takes herself to a sort of religious reform institution but soon leaves and for various reasons flees to a town on the Welsh border, the town her parents came from, and through a deception comes to live with dressmaker Jane Jones, her mother's best friend, and her family, as a maid and sewing apprentice. Through her life there, the reader sees the many ways in which women's lives are hard, and unfree, as well as the harsh class system. Despite resisting, Mary comes to like her life there in some ways, as Jane mothers her in a way she has never been mothered before, but part of her always wants to return to the excitement of London, and she returns to prostitution to fund that trip. Needless to say, nothing can be kept a secret forever in such a small town and the novel builds to a melodramatic conclusion.

There are a lot of ideas in this book, and the meaning of freedom, especially for women, is one of the most important. Different female characters have different degrees of freedom, or the lack thereof, including slavery by another name for a black woman who has escaped from harsher slavery and lives as an unpaid maid in the Jones household, the need of a poor woman abandoned by her husband to be a wet nurse for the babies of others, and the way Jane Jones has to demean herself in front of her "better" customers. Secrets kept and told are another theme, as are barrenness and procreation, the harshness of life in the 18th century, the struggle to survive, how clothes do or don't make the woman, how clothes and books both reveal and deceive, life in small towns versus life in cities, and more. In some ways I wish this novel had been a more "serious" exploration of some of these topics; I think the ambivalence I feel about it is that it tries to both a fun read and a novel of ideas.

I wonder how you'd find Life Mask, her subsequent novel to this one - I think Slammerkin was probably her most successful before Room - Life Mask is also set in the 18th century but is perhaps more serious, less populist, though she does manage to include the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" - I think it was published in 2004.

38. Transit by Anna Seghers

Anyone who has seen the movie Casablanca, even if not as many times as I have, will remember the opening frames in which a route is traced across Europe from Paris to Marseille and from there to Oran and then Casablanca, where they "wait . . . and wait" for their exit visas. But before the refugees from Nazi Europe waited in Casablanca, or elsewhere, they waited in Marseille, the only port in France remaining in French hands. And it is Marseille in 1940/41 which is at the center of this stunning novel, written soon after Seghers herself fled from Marseille to Martinique (on the same ship as Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Serge, and Andre Breton, all traveling on visas arranged by Varian Fry) and then to Mexico. It was published in 1944 in English and Spanish before being published in German, but I read the new English translation published by NYRB.

This is a book that is fascinating on multiple levels. At the most basic, it is a portrait of a wintry Marseille and of the refugees who flooded there after the fall of Paris and much of France, their desperation to get on the "last ship," and the insanely Catch 22 nature of the visa process, in which you couldn't get an exit visa if you didn't have a transit visa (allowing you to travel through countries on the way to your final destination), and you also had to have all sorts of other papers including ones that allowed you to stay in Marseille, which you couldn't get unless you had other papers proving that you planned to leave. Consulates open and close, many consular officials don't care about scheduling visa appointments before the ship someone has booked passage on is to leave, some people exert influence through money and other means, some sailors figure out ways to make money by including refugees on cargo ships, and more. Refugees live in hotels or rooming houses, exploited by landlords and landladies, hang out in cafes (despite the alcohol-free days), and gossip, gossip, gossip -- about visas and ships and money.

At the same time, this is something of a thriller. The narrator, known as Seidler because of the papers he obtained, a German who escaped from a concentration camp and fled to Paris, and then fled from Paris to Marseille, has wound up with the manuscript of and letters to a German writer named Weidel and thus finds himself mistaken for Weidel by various consular officials when he is trying to arrange to get the materials to Weidel's wife. He is not sure he wants to leave, although he isn't supposed to stay in Marseilles unless he is going to, as he has friends in Marseille and, then, becomes obsessed with a woman who comes into many of the cafes and restaurants he frequents, looking frantically at all the tables as if she is searching for someone she never finds. The woman turns out to be the lover of a doctor who is treating the son of Seidler's friends. Then the reader, a moment before Seidler, realizes who the woman is. Plot complications develop. Will they escape together or separately? Will they understand the connection between Seidler and Weidel? What is Seidler really up to?

And the novel is also a meditation on the nature of identity, the difficulties of exile, the ancient history of Marseille as a port and point of departure for many cultures, and human motivations for good or for evil. Along the way, Seghers, who is a terrific writer, introduces a variety of fascinating secondary characters. While I enjoyed the plot, I think I was more intrigued by Seghers' portrait of the city, the refugees, and their frantic activities, as well as by the narrator's thoughts about Marseilles and his life there. There is an elegiac, sorrowful feel to the book about this particular time and place, but it also speaks to the life and plight of refugees in all times and places.

Some examples of Seghers' prose.

"Then my mood changed. Why? Who knows what causes these mood changes. Suddenly I no longer thought all the chitchat was disgusting; it seemed fascinating now. It was the age-old harbor gossip, as ancient as the Old Port itself and even older. Wonderful, ancient harbor twaddle that's existed as long as there's been a Mediterranean Sea, Phoenician chitchat, Cretan and Greek gossip, and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips who were anxious about their berths aboard a ship and about their money, or who were fleeing from all the real and imagined horrors of the world. Mothers who had lost their children, children who had lost their mothers. The remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another." p. 78

"Aren't you thoroughly fed up with such thrilling stories? Aren't you sick of all these suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger by a hair, about breathtaking escapes? Me, I'm sick and tired of them. If something still thrills me today, then maybe it's an old worker's yarn about how many feet of wire he's drawn in the course of his long life and what tools he used, or the glow of the lamplight by which a few children are doing their homework." p. 4

#162 I think just knowing that she uses the term "weapons of mass destruction" in a book set in the 18th century is enough to make me avoid it!

Hmmm...Transit sounds very good. Thumb up for the reviewer, too!

Beautiful and intriguing review of Transit, Rebecca. Going to wishlist this one.

Thanks, Linda and Tui. I get e-malil notices from NYRB about their new releases, and this one sounded like just my kind of book, so I looked for it the last time I was in my favorite bookstore.

Transit is going on my wishlist! Thank you for the review.

39. The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh

It is 1975 and the American War has been won as this tragic and stunning novel begins, yet Kien, a veteran of ten years of fighting, is still in the Vietnamese army, in the Missing In Action Remains-Gathering Team, and the team is on the edge of the Jungle of Screaming Souls, an area he knows well, because it was the site of vicious fighting in 1969 from which only ten members of his battalion survived. Here soldiers see ghosts, of Vietnamese and Americans, of animals and humans, souls that have not yet found the peace of death. And the Jungle of Screaming Souls is in a way a metaphor for the rest of this book, whose Vietnamese title means "My Destiny of Love," as Kien relentlessly searches his memories, of war and love, to try to understand the past, the present, and maybe the future.

The book moves somewhat haphazardly between Kien's life in the present as a writer trying to write a novel about the war and his life, his life during the war in the midst of horrifying fighting, and his life before the war, especially his love for his neighbor and schoolmate, the beautiful Phuong. And yet, there is a method to the haphazardness, because as the book (both Ninh's and Kien's) progresses Kien delves deeper into his memories and reveals more of the trauma he and Phuong experienced at the beginning of the war. It is as if he is spiraling deeper and deeper into his own soul and memories. What Ninh is doing grows on the reader as the book goes on.

Clearly, this book exists on several levels. Without a doubt, as all the blurbs on my copy say, it is an indictment of the horror (and sorrow) of war, and war scenes are rendered in great and disturbing detail. According to Wikipedia, Ninh was a member of something called the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade: of the 500 young men and women originally in it, only ten survived, and of these I read elsewhere (sorry, forget where) six committed suicide. At points, Ninh's writing about Kien's postwar experiences sound exactly like what we now know as post-traumatic stress syndrome. What does it mean to kill? What does it mean to survive when others die, even sacrifice themselves? In the way it describes the nitty gritty of war and how soldiers cope, it is a counterpart to the also brilliant Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes.

At the same time, it is a portrait of life in Hanoi, both pre- and postwar, and an illustration of the differences, found around the world, between city dwellers and country dwellers who find themselves thrown together. It is a story about the role of art in various forms: music and painting, as well as writing. It is in a way a coming-of-age story, as Kien reflects on his and Phuong's parents, although a coming-of-age by fire. And it is a tale of young love and of innocence shattered.

But maybe most of all, it is a novel about memory - what we remember, how we remember it, how with effort (in Kien's case through writing and, perhaps, alcohol; with others, perhaps, through therapy) we can access the very things that disturb us the most and that we keep hidden even from ourselves. And the novel explores the meaning of the past. At one point, early in the book, Kien muses:

"My life seems little different from that of a sampan pushed upstream towards the past. The future lied to us, there long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful prewar past." p. 47

Ninh's book was controversial, and was published in English long before being widely available in Vietnam. Ninh worked with a translator and an Australian author/translator/war correspondent (who is listed as "editor") to produce the English version (per Wikipedia). Here's an example of what might have annoyed the censors, although much is more subtle than this:

After 1975, all that had quieted. The wind of war had stopped. The branches of conflict had stopped rustling. As we had won, Kien thought, then that meant justice had won; that had been some consolation. Or had it? Think carefully; look at your own existence. Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and sad. And look at who won the war.

To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But for those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death, and inhuman violence have also won." p. 193

I haven't really touched on Phuong's story, but it's an important component of the novel, as is her own wartime trauma and response. It is seen through Kien's eyes, but he gradually comes to understand her better, although he is still heartbroken about her leaving him.

This is a disturbing and eye-opening, yet beautiful book.

For years I avoided any book or movie that dealt with the Vietnam war. Lately, I've decided I'm finally ready to handle the subject matter. I'm not sure whether I'll start with history or fiction, but The Sorrow of War sounds like an eventual "must read". I should be paying you for the excellent job of pointing out the "disturbing...yet beautiful" books out there, on many fronts.

Thanks, Linda. I can recommend a couple of books if you're interested in starting with fiction; I haven't read any nonfiction about the war in decades. And yes, I tend to like "disturbing" and "grim" books.

Great review, Rebecca. That goes straight on my wish list.

And mine. Thanks.

#171 By all means, recommend. Although if they are things you've read recently I may already have made note of them. I have a copy of Stanley Karnow's Vietnam, A History, and A Bright Shining Lie is on my wishlist, so I think I'm good for non-fiction.

Linda, I have had A Bright Shining Lie on my shelves for years, but I don't think I ever read it. I did read both The Best and the Brightest and Fire in the Lake back about the time they came out, and I thought they were excellent, but they were written while the war was still being fought. I really haven't followed which post-war history books are considered important, so I'm sure you're good with the ones you have.

My biggest recommendations for fiction, in addition to The Sorrow of War, are Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, which I read a year or two ago and which I thought was remarkable, and the classic The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Both of them provide the perspective of the (very young) men doing the actual fighting, although the Marlantes has a somewhat broader view. I also really enjoyed Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which is a complicated, convoluted, poetic look at the CIA"s role in the Vietnam war.

Of course, you can't go wrong with the movie "Apocalypse Now"!

ETA Thanks, Rhonda and ipsoivan!

I remember your review of Matterhorn; I have The Things They Carried too...that may be where I start. I actually did sit through Apocalypse Now! when it first became available for home viewing....it was a torture for me, but one day I will give it another go. My husband has watched it repeatedly. (He's also a fan of Conrad, so it figures). A "poetic" look at the CIA---now that I MUST explore! Thanks, Rebecca.

Well, it's poetic because Johnson is a poetic writer, not because of the subject matter which, as above, is "grim."

40. Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry

"The French Government is obliged to surrender upon demand all Germans* named by the German Government in France, as well as in French possessions, Colonies, Protectorate Territories and Mandates" From Article XIX of the Franco-German Armistice

*"Germans" came to include anyone in territories the Nazis had conquered, and indeed anyone they wanted.

After reading Anna Seghers's Transit, and learning that she escaped from Marseille to Martinique with the help of Varian Fry, I realized that I'd had his book on my shelves for probably 15 years, and that it seemed like a good time to finally read it.

When the Nazis invaded Paris in June 1940, Varian Fry was a 32-year-old journalist and former classics major who had visited Germany in 1935 and been horrified by the Nazis even in those early years. Three days after the French surrender, the Emergency Rescue Committee was formed; its mission was to rescue many of the European artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals who had initially fled from all corners of Europe to France and who now needed to flee France as well. Varian Fry agreed to go to Marseille to help get them out, believing that it would take him three weeks to contact the people on the ERC's list and not much longer to get them out with the help he believed he would receive from the US consulate in Marseille.

This is the story of the 13 months Fry spent in Marseille and its environs, before finally being expelled with the aid of the US State Department. During that time, he and his colleagues helped some 4000 people and were able to send some 2000 safely out of France. These people included some of the foremost artists, intellectuals, and labor and political leaders of the time, people such as André Breton, Max Ernst, Franz Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Victor Serge, among many others. To do this, he found himself working 18-hour days and doing whatever was necessary, including buying passports and visas, working with gangsters and forgers and money changers, as well as with representatives of the British military, searching for boats that could take people away, and generally staying one step ahead of the French police and the Gestapo (which not "officially" active in unoccupied Marsellle). Fry introduces us to the diverse group of people who helped in both his above-ground and clandestine activities, and to a who's who of European artists, intellectuals, and anti-Nazis.

More exciting than spy fiction because it is real, this book is also the story of a man who found himself unalterably changed by the situation he found himself in and who then found the courage to face incredible danger and undertake activities that he probably never dreamed he would ever engage in, all because they were necessary to get people out. In fact, the afterword to the edition I read (written by curators of the exhibit on Fry that was the opening exhibit at US Holocaust Museum), quotes a letter Fry wrote to his wife on his way home from Europe in which he says "I do not think I will ever be quite the same person I was when I kissed you goodbye . . . For the experiences of ten, fifteen, and even twenty years have been pressed into one. Sometimes I feel I have lived a whole life (and one to which I have no right) since I first walked down the monumental staircase of the Gare St. Charles in Marseille and timidly took a small back room at the Hotel Splendide . . ."

Fry started writing this book after he returned, but didn't end up publishing it until 1945. He kept no notes while he was in France, and in fact he frequently mentions burning papers just ahead of police visits, but his experiences must have been indelibly recorded in his brain, because the people and his activities come alive in his writing. One of the parts I enjoyed was the way some French and other officials unofficially helped Fry and the refugees, or at least looked the other way. In one amusing episode, a sentry at the Spanish border saw the paperwork Golo Mann, who had just climbed over a mountain to enter Spain with his uncle Heinrich Mann, and realized he was the son of Thomas Mann. Of course, when the sentry asked them about this, they feared being on a Gestapo list, but the sentry said he was honored to meet the son of "so great a man" and then sent for a car to come and get them.

Shamefully, the US government did not fully support Fry in his activities, which he found shocking; this got worse as time went on, and finally the State Department collaborated in Fry's being expelled from France. The US became more concerned about letting political "undesirables" into the country than with protecting the intellectual and artistic elite of Europe. Fry came to believe that people in the US didn't fully understand what was going on in Europe, and that he had to write this book to make them see. In his original introduction, which was not published in 1945 but which is included as an appendix to my edition, he wrote:

"I have tried -- God knows I have tried -- to get back into the mood of American life since I left France for the last time. But it doesn't work. There is only one way to try and that is the way I am going to try now. If I can get it all out, put it all down just as it happened, if I can make others see it and feel it as I did, then maybe I can sleep soundly again at night. . . . Those ghosts won't stop haunting me until I have done their bidding. They are the ghosts of the living who do not want to die. Go back, they said, go back and make America understand, make Americans understand before it is too late."

Varian Fry was the first American to be recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the Holocaust, as
"Righteous Among the Nations," a non-Jew who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

41. A Priest in the House (The Conquest of Plassans) by Émile Zola

I read this Rougon-Macquart book out of sequence because I only recently discovered it was available in a 1957 English translation, but whatever possessed the translator to call it "A Priest in the House" instead of "The Conquest of Plassans" and the publisher to give it that horrifying cover boggles my mind. It really is a story about the conquest of Plassans, Zola's fictional southern French town, by that priest, not the story of the priest in the house. I guess they thought it would sell more books.

At the beginning of the novel, a seemingly awkward new priest, Abbé Faujas, comes to town and, at the request of the current priest, lodges with his mother in the happy and comfortable house of the Mourets, François and Marthe (née Rougon) (François is her cousin, descended from the Macquart side of the family). The Mourets have three children: Octave, who will reappear in Pot Luck and The Ladies Paradise, and Serge who, along with the mentally challenged sister Desirée, will reappear in The Sin of Father Mouret. Marthe's parents are the Rougons who appeared in the first Rougon-Macquart novel, The Fortune of the Rougons.

At first everyone wonders about the new priest, because he keeps to himself and seems inept socially. Gradually we learn that Marthe's mother, who keeps a salon that attracts all three factions of the town (the old nobility, the followers of Napoleon's empire, and the royalists who want to bring the traditional royal family back), has schemed with someone in Paris (presumably her son, His Excellency, Eugene Rougon), to have Faujas come to Plassans, but it isn't clear why. As time goes on, Marthe becomes attracted spiritually and emotionally to the priest, and becomes involved in more religious and social welfare activities, neglecting her husband, her home, and her children, which heretofore had been the center of her life. A sister and brother-in-law of the priest arrive in town and seem to be up to no good. Life in the Mouret home deteriorates, until the novel builds to a melodramatic and not completely believable conclusion.

The strength of this novel is more in its depiction of the pettiness and cattiness and scheming of provincial life than in the machinations of the priest, whose transformation from awkward newcomer to cold and haughty schemer I found hard to take. It also effectively illustrates the role of the church in society. The minor characters of the townspeople are all well drawn, as is the picture of the Mouret home and its bucolic setting. François, at first, has good instincts about who to be suspicious of, and Faujas's mother is a wonderful creation as well. But the changes in François, Marthe, and Faujas himself just didn't seem real to me: dramatic, yes, plausible, a stretch.

In this book also, Zola lays on his genetic theories pretty thick, as both François and Marthe are grandchildren of the founding mother of the Rougon-Macquart families who is now in an insane asylum in town that is actually featured in this novel; the physical similarity of both François and Marthe to her is remarked on, and Marthe fears she is going insane.

There was a lot to like in this novel, and it was hard to put down as it built to its conclusion. I'm glad I read it, as it helped me fill in some of the blanks in the Rougon-Macquart cycle

I have to read the book by Varian Fry- thank you for the review.
Did you read Villa Air-Bel World War 11, Escape and a House in Marseille by Rosemary Sullivan about the same story?

Thanks, Cyrel. I wasn't familiar with that book. The review on LT makes it sound like it covers some of the same ground (maybe based on Surrender on Demand, since it was originally published in 1945), but adds more about the artists themselves. The review says they bought the Villa Air-Bel, but they only rented it from an eccentric landlord.

42. Lucifer Unemployed by Aleksander Wat

Wat published this book of short stories in 1927. The Great War (not yet World War I) was over. Nazism had not yet started, and Stalin hadn't reached his murderous heights. Wat, according to his fascinating memoir, My Century, was a futurist and a dadaist, movements which, as far as I can tell, rejected traditional forms in an attempt to reflect the changes in the post-war world and distaste for bourgeois conceptions of art. In these stories, ideas play the central role, along with playfulness and satire, not character or plot.

For example, the title story, which is the last story in the volume, takes the idea that the devil has been put out of business by the modern world, and poor unemployed Lucifer goes around talking to people in various lines of work who illustrate for him why the devil is no longer needed. In the first story, "The Eternally Wandering Jew," Jews take over the Catholic church and start these new Catholics go on to oppress the now ex-Catholics in the same way the church and society formerly oppressed Jews. In "Kings in Exile," the former crowned heads of Europe are exiled to a remote island, where they attempt to recreate the world as they had known, and end up regressing through the stages of civilization. In one of my favorite stories, "The History of the Last Revolution in England," a soccer ball intrudes on a fight between the revolutionaries and the military, and they end up setting themselves up as soccer teams instead. In several of the stories, such as "Has Anyone Seen Pigeon Street?," Wat turns the idea of reality on its head -- with a trick at the end.

In some ways the stories are prescient. Although the worst horrors of the 20th century, horrors that ended up enveloping Wat, were yet to happen, a reader (or maybe only a reader now, who knows what happened next), can feel something ominous hanging over some of the stories. They can be playful, but they are serious, and they don't embrace the modernity they represent.

Wat musing on history and the future:

"Does it always have to be true in human history that the simple, safe, small, insignificant, worthless things excite more passion, kindle more courage, animosity, and heroism; arouse more interest and encourage greater effort than than the dangerous, harmful, great, dignified, deadly things? So be it -- we will say with great solemnity. If that is how things really are, we should be happy, for there are so many harmful and explosive and annihilating things that one should wish that humanity should devote as little attention to them as possible." From "The History of the Last Revolution in England," p. 37.

A quote I appreciated as an editor:

" 'Here I am to offer you my collaboration,' he said to the editor. 'I know all the secrets of creation, and I will reveal things to you no one else knows.'

'Why, that's impossible,' the editor replied. 'We know everything already. To know everything is our raison d'ȇtre. As it is, we have more contributors than subscribers. Maybe some other time.'" From "Lucifer Unemployed," p. 95.

Wat the poet making fun of poets and language:

"Poets and snobs congregated here: poets and snobbery go together as nicely as a thrown rock and ripples in water. This is the place where the wisemen who sucked wisdom out of the pacifier of words got together. What a shame! What a shame that for so long we have lacked a nurse of revelation! Words are tubercular, syphilitic, and preserve in their countless tissues swarming colonies of ambiguous microbes. By means of the same words some pave the way for European Buddhism, others propagate Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The latter are blood brothers to the inventors of deadly dynamite, all of course in the name of pacifism. And even if one finds healthy words in some out-of-the-way place, words securely fastened to the earth, even then poets would unchain them and punch them into the empty, vacant sky. What a shame! What a shame! And it's not as if they were mad dogs. They were only the colored bubbles of words." From "Lucifer Unemployed," pp. 105-106

I had mixed feelings about this book. I admired Wat's language, his wit, and his ideas, but I found it hard to get into the stories themselves.

Very interesting review. I'll look for the book when I have a chance.

eta: when I go to add it to my wishlist, it only comes up in Polish! You didn't read it in Polish, did you?

No, there's an English translation published by Northwestern University Press, but there must be more copies of it in Polish than in English on LT so the title comes up in Polish. I highly recommend first reading My Century, which is stunning.

I noted My Century for exploration after reading your review...I think I'll let this story collection alone, and see if it resurfaces on its own some time in the future (as things sometimes do, when they're ready for me!)

43. Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey

I owe this thoroughly delightful read to a review by MJ (detailmuse), and it was the perfect accompaniment to waiting for my car at the shop: a quick, easy read that nonetheless had some meat to it. Not only did I enjoy revisiting the process of diagramming sentences, but I also appreciated Florey's entertaining examples (largely from literature) and her comments about other, more or less related, topics. She is an engaging writer and seems like a person I would like to know. This book was a lot of fun.

Sister Bernadette sounds like fun. I never did understand sentence diagramming, however, and found grammar in general a mystery until I took German. I have now forgotten the German, but the process helped my get the different parts of speech.

Oh, I've got to get that 'Sister Bernadette' book. I have a deep and abiding love for diagramming sentences, although I'm so out of practice these days I'd have trouble diagramming "See Spot run."

Wat sounds interesting, someone you read with a bit of thought to the past. I've heard good things about Sister Bernadette too. Sadly, I missed sentence diagramming when I went to school only to catch it in the Special Ed classes I help. I feel as though I don't have the full experience. ;)

Thanks for stopping by, Rhonda, Rosalita, and Cammykitty! I remember diagramming sentences, although I don't think my school put a lot of emphasis on it, and I did enjoy it. I remember learning more formal grammar from studying French; I don't mean I didn't learn grammar, just that we learned it without memorizing all the parts of speech and how you use them, etc.

I worked as an editor for many years and, when I applied for one job, they gave me a test that involved not only correcting incorrect sentences (which was easy for me), but explaining WHY they were incorrect. That''s when I knew the job wasn't for me!

I loved diagramming sentences in high school. I saw a review of Sister Bernadette on someone's thread a couple of years ago that motivated me to buy a copy of the book, but I haven't read it yet. Your review is a reminder to nudge it up the TBR queue.

The Varian Fry book sounds remarkable. It's funny but I've been reading The Real Mrs. Miniver who was sent to the U.S. to try to persuade Americans to join the war. A very different perspective but she ran into the same attitude Fry did, from the sound of it.

Some excellent reviewing here, Rebecca. Thank you.

Thanks, Carrie and Tui. I haven't heard of The Real Mrs. Miniver, but that's interesting. Varian Fry was a remarkable person.

44. This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This novel paints a vivid and often, indeed, melodramatic portrait of the evils of Dutch colonialism and institutionalized racism in Indonesia at the very end of the 19th century. It gave me insight into a time and a place that were largely unfamiliar. It is also a coming-of-age story, a political tale, and, less successfully, a love story. Originally created and recited orally while the author was imprisoned by the postcolonial government and denied access to writing materials, this novel is the first part of a quartet.

The story is told by Minke, who is about 16 when it begins and an aspiring writer. The descendent of Javanese nobles (although the reader doesn't know this as first), Minke is a Native, in the terminology of the time, below the Indos (Indo-Europeans, who are half Indonesian and half European), who in turn are below the Pures (or white Europeans, largely Dutch). Nonetheless, he has been allowed to attend an elite Dutch school where he is the only Native, and has been influenced by his teachers' emphasis on the ideals of European culture. The school is in Surabaya, which Wikipedia tells me is now Indonesia's second largest city, although it seems to be a pretty sleepy town in this novel; Minke boards with a couple there.

As the novel begins, Minke is taken by a friend to visit a house that lies out of town (and just down the road from a Chinese brothel). There lives a Nyai, or concubine, a Native woman who lives with a European man without being married, her beautiful daughter Annalies, and her son Robert. As Minke's friend hangs out with the son, Minke comes to know both Annalies and the mother, and they warmly encourage him to return, as Annalies has no other friends. The mother, who goes by Nyai, but asks Minke to call her Mama, is a remarkable woman. As the reader finds out later, she was sold by her parents to the Dutch man, and then taught herself reading, languages (including flawless Dutch), and business practices, and now runs the Dutch man's entire business enterprise.

As the tale progresses, the reader learns more about Nyai's and Minke's backgrounds, Minke meets some interesting but not fully developed characters who help in various ways, falls in love with Annalies, visits his parents, and becomes involved in a catastrophic series of events. These events, and the variety of other characters, serve to illustrate both the complexity and the horror of the colonial system.

I had mixed feelings about this book, and there were times when I almost gave up on it, largely because I just couldn't understand the relationship between Minke and Annalies. Minke is a smart, thoughtful, young man and Annalies, although ravishingly beautiful, seems painfully lacking in almost everything else; she is clearly psychologically disturbed and clings onto her vision of escape through being constantly with Minke (some of the weaker portions of the book are where the devoted European doctor tries to explain early psychology to Minke). The strongest parts of the novel are the development of Minke and the portrait of colonial Indonesia: the people, the landscape, the racism, the oppression, and the various kinds of resistance to the Dutch. By the end of the book, I enjoyed it enough to order the next volume in the quartet, which will follow Minke as he develops as a journalist.

Great books and great reviews, as always. I must get tha book on diagramming sentences. I'm old enough to have had just a little exposure to that, in grade school, as I recall, but it's a great way to look at good writing. Not on Kindle, alas - so I'll have to hit Barnes and Noble this afternoon.

Thanks!

Thanks for stopping by, Judy, and thanks for the compliment. The diagramming book is a lot of fun -- not sure if B&N will have it as it's a few years old. I got it from Amazon.

I found quite a few copies through ABEbooks, although B&N has it listed too. While shopping online for it, I found quite a few other books on the subject - and here I thought it was a dying art!

I've had Lucifer, Unemployed on my shelf for a while. Your review makes me want to get to it sooner. I had mixed feelings about This Earth of Mankind too, but when I finished, like you, I bought the second volume. I haven't read it yet though.

I'm heading back to NY Thursday. This time I'm bringing a lot of junk for my new grandson (some of my son's children's books which I kept; a small bronze sculpture my mother-in-law made of my son when he was an infant), I may actually have space and weight in my suitcase to buy a few books while I'm there. :)

Hope you enjoy Lucifer, Unemployed when you read it, Deborah, and have a good trip to see your grandson! My copy of the next volume of the Buru Quartet arrived yesterday, so I might read it soon while I'm still thinking about This Earth of Mankind.

How long will you be in NY? is that NYC?

I have had the Varian Fry at my house to read for at least 2 years now. I really need to find my copy and get it read! Thanks for the reminder, Rebecca.

Rebecca - I am planning on reading This Earth of Mankind this year too and your, as always, fascinating review has piqued my interest sufficiently to move it forward to next month.

Thanks for stopping by, Stasia and Paul. Stasia, I think you will like the Varian Fry, and Paul, I'll be interested in your thoughts about a book from a place so close to where you live.

As always excellent reviews Rebecca. Very enjoyable and easy to read.

45. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

This is a difficult book for me to write about, not because the story was as bleak as the landscape, but because it was a challenge for me not to view the characters and their actions through the lens of the early 21st century instead of through that of the late 19th. Oh, there were so many times I wanted to slap Jude, and especially his cousin and love Sue, and tell them to shape up! But they were limited by the economic and social constraints of the time, by their own personalities, and of course by the author's vision. For as much as Jude and Sue and the other more peripheral characters come alive, as much as Hardy vividly pictures the grimness of their lives and surroundings, this is in many ways a novel of ideas.

As is well known, Jude as a youth is a dreamer, seeing beyond the harsh life he has lived with his great-aunt in a farming village and imagining a life as a scholar in nearby (but oh so far away) Christminster (aka Oxford). In that, he is like every young person who has longed to escape from a small town to the lights (literally) of the city. And like many young men before him, he is "trapped" by a woman, the scheming, but at least lively, Arabella. Eventually Arabella disappears to Australia, and Jude comes to Christchurch as a stone mason while continuing to study the classics on his own by night; there he meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, a "modern" woman who works as an artisan in a religious bookstore and against whom he has been warned by his great-aunt. Jude falls in love with Sue, who marries someone else who it turns out she can't bear to let near her sexually, and then agrees to live with Jude; many complications ensue, including a truly horrifying, if not somewhat melodramatic, one near the end of the book.

Partly the book is about the constraints of class and finances, and how this leads people with money and family connections to the university, even if they end up slumming in the bars of the town, while people without those advantages, even if they study on their own and have deep interests in academics, are barred from the doors of the colleges. Partly the novel is about the constraints of social custom and how society shuns those who don't follow its rules. These aspects of the book were well done, although certainly not unique.

What I found more interesting, and find myself still thinking about, is the characters of Jude and Sue and what Hardy may have been trying to do. It is surely no accident that neither of them has a real family (Jude is raised by a great-aunt, Sue seems to be estranged from her own family) and that Jude has been warned by his great-aunt that the family isn't cut out for marriage. Does Hardy believe that there is some genetic component to this aversion to staying with someone under the laws of the land, or does he view his characters as people ahead of their time? When we see Jude unable to take a firm stand, is this just his temperament or is Hardy commenting on his "weaknesses" for drink and women, "weaknesses" he needs a woman to protect him from? When Hardy portrays Sue as a nervous, jealous, demanding, sometimes almost child-like young woman who shuns not only marriage but also sexual relationships, is he portraying her as an independent woman of the future? (Some have said Sue is the first "feminist" in literature, something I have a hard time agreeing with.) Needless to say, Sue drove me batty; I much preferred the earthy Arabella who, though scheming, at least knew what she wanted and went after it -- until her heartless actions towards the end of the book.

Hardy is a wonderful writer, and the landscape of "Wessex," the lives and homes of its residents, the architecture of Christminster's colleges, and the nature of stone working are vividly depicted. However, it was clear to me that there was more going on in this novel than I got. It is filled with references to other English writers and to religious sources whose significance largely eluded me, even though they were helpfully cited in endnotes in the Modern Library edition I read. Although the references to sex are obscure for the modern reader, this book shocked its contemporaries when it was published because of its implicit criticism of religious, social, and educational institutions. While still a compelling story today, it does seem to be very much a novel of its time.

46. Reticence by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

At the beginning of this somewhat mysterious novella, the narrator observes a dead cat in the water of the harbor in the small town he and his infant son are visiting, and believes the cat has been "murdered." At the end of the novella, the mystery of the cat's death is solved. In between, the narrator goes about his business, seemingly viewing none of his very strange actions as anything other than ordinary. He becomes obsessed with the idea that a man named Biaggi, a man who is apparently his friend and who apparently he has come to see, is following him and observing him, and goes to great (and illegal) lengths to try to catch Biaggi in the act. He tends to his son, and then at other times leaves him by himself in the hotel room. He reveals something which may be true or may be entirely in his imagination. His behavior throughout is extremely peculiar and, though he is obviously an extremely unreliable narrator, it may in fact be what he really did because he seems to have no awareness that his behavior is so peculiar.

Is he reticent about visiting Biaggi properly? Is he reticent about telling the readers the "truth"? Although I was mystified by this book, it was a quick read and I enjoyed it.

Rebecca - What a great review of Jude the Obscure. I've been a fan of Thomas Hardy since I read Tess and Mayor of Casterbridge, but Jude the Obscure is my least favorite of his works. I felt like you did, in wanting to slap Jude and Sue or at least shake them vigorously, and to demand that they just shape up and stop whining. I think Hardy was writing about the clear class distinctions and social taboos of the time, and in that, I consider the book a success. I just wish he could have given me characters I could feel more sympathy for.

Rebecca, I agree with Caroline that you have done a great review of Jude the Obscure, but I have to disagree since this is one of my favorite of Thomas Hardy's novels. I agree that often I felt like telling them to shape up and do something- but in a sense that's the way many people see life. Just as given and whine about it.

Thanks, Caroline and Manuel. This was my first Hardy, although I have a vague memory that I was supposed to read The Mayor of Casterbridge one summer when I was in school, but I have no recollection of the book itself. I may eventually read something else by him (I have Far from the Madding Crowd on my TBR), but probably not very soon.

Refreshing to see a well considered review of Thomas Hardy's work. It seems quite fashionable to give him stick these days but, for me, his front line novels are consistently wonderful. My own preferences would be:

1 Return of the Native
2 Far From the Madding Crowd
3 Jude the Obscure
4 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
5 The Mayor of Casterbridge

I don't think the rest of his work is as strong but I read those five in my late teens and loved them with a passion.

(piping up to say) I'm reading Far from the Madding Crowd right now, and I'm loving it. Hardy has such an ear for how people talk. I think this is the first Hardy that I've read, but it won't be the last. I think the next up will be Jude the Obscure--thanks for the review!

Karen O.

Thanks for stopping by, Paul and Karen, and thanks for that list, Paul. I'm not sure I'll be up to more Hardy for a while, though.

I need to try Hardy again. I admit I ended up preferring his poetry the last time that I read him.

Another voice in favor of reading Villa Air-Bel, which I think is EXCELLENT. It really offers a portrayal of the personalities of the artists, and a sense of what it must have been like to hang out with the surrealists and others. It's very well-rounded, comprehensive and thoughtful. I think Fry also features in passing in The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas.

I have had This Earth of Mankind sitting on my shelves for decades, since a second cousin spent a year or two working on a publishing-related project in Jakarta way back in the mid/late 80s.

Well, I guess you've sold me, Suzanne! I just ordered Villa Air-Bel.