Rebeccanyc Reads in 2013, Part 2

* means a favorite read

Read in April
31. An Armenian Sketchbook by Vassily Grossman*
30. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol*
29. Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories we Tell about Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough
28. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
27. The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant*
26. Smile As They Bow by Nu Nu Yi
25. The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz*
24. It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter

Read in March
23. The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
22. To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia*
21. Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia
20. War and War by László Krasznahorkai*
19. The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ouřednik*
18. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss*
17. Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera
16. A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
15. News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh
14. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac*

Read in February
13. Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
Read on Previous Thread
12. The City Builder by George Konrád
11. Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore*
10. Old Man Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
9. The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola
8. Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier*

Read in January
7. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
6. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel*
5. My Century by Alexander Wat*
4. Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi
3. The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo*
2. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss*
1. Pot Luck by Emile Zola

Books Recommended by Others
(Idea for this stolen from Deebee's thread)

The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn Recommended by SassyLassy Bought 1/9
Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas Recommended by dmsteyn Bought 1/9
Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats Recommended by RidgewayGirl
The Recognitions by William Gaddis Recommended by EnriqueFreeque
The Embarrassment of Riches by Simon Schama Recommended by deebee Bought 4/2
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi Recommended by steven03tx
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey Recommended by detailmuse
Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog Recommended bymkboylan
Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger Recommended by Linda92007
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz Recommended by Lisa/labfs39 Bought 2/15
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Recommended by MK/detailmuse and SassyLassy
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto Recommended by Lois/avaland Gift from Lois
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History by Peter Heather Recommended by deebee
The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People by Neil Shubin Recommended by detailmuse
Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton Recommended by RidgewayGirl
Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street by Neil Barofsky Recommended by Chris/cabegley
Color Me English by Caryl Phillips Recommended by Linda92007
Brodeck, Monsieur Linh and His Child, and Grey Souls by Phillipe Claudel Recommended by Lisa/labfs39
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King Recommended by Cyrel/torontoc
Freud (The Routledge Philosophers) by Jonathan Lear Recommended by Dewald/dmsteyn
The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth Recommended by SassyLassy

List by country of books read in 2013 (i.e., country of author)

Asia

Burma/Myanmar
Smile As They Bow by Nu Nu Yi

Central America (and Mexico) and the Caribbean
Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba)

Europe

Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic
The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ouřednik
Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

England and the UK
Fiction
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Nonfiction
Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories we Tell about Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

France
The Sin of Father Mouret by Émile Zola
The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
Old Man Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola
The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
Pot Luck by Emile Zola

Hungary
War and War by László Krasznahorkai
The City Builder by George Konrád
Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi

Italy
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia
Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia

Poland
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz
My Century by Aleksander Wat

Russia/Soviet Union
An Armenian Sketchbook by Vassily Grossman
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

US and Canada

USA
Fiction
News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh

Nonfiction
It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

I really enjoyed reading your review of The City Builder on your previous thread. Great stuff.

I decided to start a new thread now because I'm going away on Wednesday and probably won't have time tomorrow to set it up. I'm visiting my relatives in Arizona, and I don't expect to have a lot of reading time while I'm there, because they always plan a lot of activities, but I'll definitely have a lot of reading time getting there, as it's two flights in each direction, with a layover in Dallas. Of course, I'm probably bringing more books than I'll have time to read, but better that than the reverse. Here's what I'm planning to bring.

Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (looking forward to re-meeting Vautrin from Père Goriot)
The Orientalist by Tom Reiss (the author of The Black Count)
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz (inspired by reading Aleksander Wat's My Century, in which Milosz interviewed Wat)
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (originally inspired by reading about it in Ngugi's memoir, In the House of the Interpreter and more recently by wanting to read Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog)

I had hoped to finish Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild (inspired by reading Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth before I leave, but this seems unlikely, so that will be first up.

Thanks, Barry!

Of course, I'm probably bringing more books than I'll have time to read, but better that than the reverse.

Seriously. Imagine stuck on a plane sitting on the runway with nothing but the in flight magazine and someone's left-over USA Today!

Great review of The City Builder Rebecca - very helpful for me as I have that one on the pile and there weren't any reviews of it here on LT.

Hope you have fun on your trip.

>5 rebeccanyc: I have had The Orientalist unread on my shelves since it first came out. I wasn't even sure I was interested in it until I read your review of The Black Count and realized it was by the same author. It rose a bit on the list at that point, but is still not strongly calling to me. I think I'll wait and let you screen it!

the orientalist looks very interesting...

RG, I once was on a trip to the Maya region of Mexico where it was so hot I spent more time by the hotel pool than I planned. And so I ran out of books in a town that didn't even have a Spanish language bookstore as far as I could tell (I could have taught myself to read Spanish)! After that I made sure to bring more books than I think I can read whenever I go away.

Thanks, DieF. I was struck by the fact that there were no reviews of it either on LT or on Amazon.

I'll post a review once I've read it, Linda and Murr.

>11 rebeccanyc:
That's what the Bible next to your bed is for. Or the Koran if it is there and you already went through the Bible on previous trips. True story from the days before my Kindle :)

I had a similar experience! Although in my case it was being stranded on an island by a typhoon, which stopped flights out for a couple of days. I've always over-packed books since.

I'm glad you purchased The Issa Valley. I thought it was beautifully written.

Wonderful selection of books for your trip. Have fun!

Annie, I'm not sure there was a bible in my Mexican hotel, as I certainly would have read it if there were.

Wandering, stranded on an island because of a typhoon sounds scary -- and much worse with no books!

Thanks, Lisa. I should have mentioned that you recommended it when I said I wanted to read something by Milosz.

Hard to read a bible by a hotel pool.

Enjoy your trip. Wonderful reviews on Young Stalin & The City Builder (in your part 1 thread).

I hope you're having a great trip. If I'd known when you were passing through Dallas, I would at least have gone outside and waved.

I always overpack reading material as well. Lost Illusions alone is quite a bit of reading material, but well worth it. You'll be wanting to read A Harlot High and Low next. It picks up the story from Lost Illusions and brings back several characters from Pere Goriot. Three Men in a Boat is a great choice for traveling.

Good reviews of Bring up the Bodies and Doomsday Book. I actually liked ButB better than Wolf Hall, but I think that was because I listened to them both as audiobooks, and ButB translated much better to audio. They were both fantastic though!

Doomsday Book was one of my favorites when I was in high school. I can't remember disliking anything about the book...but then, of course, I was 15. So maybe there'd be parts that would annoy me today, too. :) I'll probably never know. Too many other books to read.

Home but really swamped with work. I hope to catch up with all of you and with my own thread in a day or two. I finished Jonathan Wild and am in the middle of Lost Illusions.

Great trip to my favorite bookstore: a new Vassily Grossman (An Armenian Sketchbook), a new Camilleri (The Dance of the Seagull), and a new Jennifer Haigh (News from Heaven).

Hoping to review Jonathan Wild and finish catching up tomorrow.

I have News from Heaven sitting right next to me. Perhaps I should start it next.

What bookstore were you referring to?

Nancy, my favorite NYC bookstore is Crawford-Doyle in the east 80s (I live in the west 80s, so it's an easy crosstown trip for me). It is small, but I love it because it has an excellent and intriguing selection of new books, especially on its display tables, and because the people there love books, know books, and recommend and discuss books. And, of course, because it's easy to get to. There are other, bigger independent bookstores that I go to less frequently, but this is the one I'll drop into often.

Sounds lovely. Adding it to my list of places to visit the next time I make it to NYC. I love Three Lives for many of the same reasons.

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 protégés 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.

I don't know much about Jonathan Wild, so I found your review quite informative, Rebecca. Sorry it was a somewhat disappointing read for your vacation.

Sounds like a tough read. Certainly enjoyed your review. Jack Sheppard has come up in a could places here recently, leaving me curious about this particular book.

>24 rebeccanyc:

Excellent review, Rebecca, because now I am all the more eager to read Jonathan Wild (previously, I was just a little bit more interested than lukewarm).

You wrote:

"Wild is a much more enjoyable villain in Jack Sheppard.

Wow. I need to see that for myself. Remembering the scene of the extremely cruel and bloody murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard; and the intricate, and fascinating architecture of Wild's mansion, I wonder how Wild could be less evil in Fielding's novel (unless you mean that in Jack Sheppard Wild is more gruesome (and thus more "enjoyable").

Glad to know there's an Oxford World Classics edition, which I will try to order. (but it may all take several months..).

Intriguing, to say the least.

Edwin, by an "enjoyable" villain I did mean he was more evil and more cunning and more despicable! Isn't that what you want in a melodramatic villain? Here he's mostly a greedy and deceptive thief.

Thanks, Linda and Dan. I'm glad I read it, Dan, and it wasn't a tough read, just not as fun as I had hoped.

Excellent review of Jonathan Wild. I will get to Fielding eventually.

while the satire is witty and fun, it wears thin after a while

That's often true for me with satire in general.

I've read Tom Jones and had planned to read a couple of Fielding's other novels (Joseph Andrews and Shamela), but Jonathan Wild hasn't been on my list. I guess it will stay that way.

Hey HERE you are!

Hi Merrikay! Thanks for finding me.

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.

ETA I forgot to mention that there were several places where Balzac refers to Jews in stereotypical and insulting ways; I took these as signs of the times, but they were still disconcerting. He also can be somewhat insulting to women, again probably a sign of the times. I have learned that Balzac held political view that were very conservative and royalist, but he doesn't seem to let that get in the way of portraying a variety of people, although he doesn't seem (in the two books I've read so far) to have much compassion for the poor.

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

>34 rebeccanyc: Wonderful review; a must-read collection for me and maybe a whole backlist.

Thanks, MJ. I was introduced to Haigh with The Condition, which I loved, and then read her two earlier novels, Mrs. Kimble, which was a good first novel, and Baker Towers, which was a much better second novel. I had mixed feelings about her most recent novel, Faith, both because of the topic she chose and of the narrator she chose, but I do think she's an excellent writer, and it's been fun to see her work get better.

Superb reviews as always rebecca. I must get to Balzac soon.

Great reviews, Rebecca, and I love that quote from the Jennifer Haigh book.

Great review of Lost Illusions, Rebecca. I bought a Kindle edition of Balzac's works with an earlier translator and no notes. I will probably be sorry, but the price was just too tempting.

Chiming in with praise for your review of Lost illusions; I don't think I will manage to read it this first quarter, and it is rather hefty, and my reading in French is not as swift as in English.

Thanks, Barry, Chris, Linda, and Edwin. Edwin, I read it in English, not French!

I'm glad you found Lost Illusions worthwhile (I won't say "enjoyable" since you said it was depressing). I wish I had gone straight from it to A Harlot High and Low as you are doing.

I have learned that Balzac held political view that were very conservative and royalist,

This is really surprising, especially after reading A Harlot High and Low and the way Balzac portrays the the materialism, decadence and corruption of the aristocracy. I'm currently reading Zola's The Kill, and there is so much similarity in the depiction of Parisian society that I occasionally get the two stories confused.

Steven, While Balzac supported the monarchy, he was often poor himself (that's how he knew so much about the ins and outs of borrowing money in Lost Illusions) and was such an astute observer of the world he lived in that Engels is quoted (by Wikipedia) as saying "I have learned more (from Balzac) than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together." And I did find it enjoyable -- being depressing and being enjoyable aren't opposites for me!

I found The Kill chilling!

Enjoyed your review of the Haigh book. She is an author I hadn't heard of, but Bakerton appeals to me.

You've made amazing inroads into the Balzac and Zola worlds. I really have to get back to them, but have your reviews in the meantime!

Thanks, Sassy.

This is going to be the last Balzac I read for a while. He is the first quarter author for the Author Theme Reads group this year, and I will need to move on. I also have lots of other books/authors I want to read. I'm sort of aiming for one Zola a month, though. I have to get back to the Reading Globally Eastern Europe theme read, because there were lots of books I wanted to read for that.

Wonderful review on Balzac.

Great review of News from Heaven. Hmmm. Do I want to return to Bakerton? So many books....

Great reviews of Jonathan Wild and Lost Illusions. I still want to read the Fielding but it will be interesting to compare it to Jack Sheppard, which I'd also like to get around to.

What are you thinking about all the Balzacs vs the Zolas? Do you have a preference?

Thanks, Dan, Lois, and DieF.

DieF, I find Balzac a little overwhelming because of the multitude of characters and the complexity of the scheming (at least in the books I've read/am reading). I will probably eventually come back to him after I finish A Harlot High and Low but I don't find him as compelling a story teller as Zola. (Of course, Zola is also more manageable than Balzac, at least in terms of the number of novels he wrote.) I wouldn't have started Balzac if he weren't the first quarter author for the Author Theme Readsgroup this year.

Definitely read Jack Sheppard first; it's much more fun, and it will give you a broader perspective on the times and on Jonathan Wild.

Wonderful reviews. All very tempting.

> 48-49 Was meaning to ask rebecca this, too. I've not read Balzac, so was wondering about comparisons. Rebecca, i'm curious about the "complexity of the scheming" -- does this come from having more complex characters? And whose approach hues closer to what you feel to be real?

Thanks, Amanda!

deebee, I hate to make generalizations about Balzac, who wrote more than 100 works (!), based on the two books I've read (Père Goriot and Lost Illusions) and the one I'm reading (A Harlot High and Low). But based on these, what I meant by the "complexity of the scheming" is not that the characters are more complex but that they are more scheming! They are not always who they seem to be, or they are pretending to be someone else, and they are always plotting against each other. And the plots are more complex too. Zola was a great admirer of Balzac, who pioneered "naturalism" (vs. romanticism), but I would say I find Zola's works more "real" in the characterization and plotting. I haven't yet read a lot about how Balzac worked, but Zola had a journalism background and did lots and lots of research for his novels. They don't read as though he's showing off his research, but the research does give them a feeling of reality. And in widely diverse situations too.

As Rebecca and others are doing, I've been reading both Balzac and Zola this year and noting the differences and similarities in the two.

The two are much alike in their style, choices of subject matter, and judgments. But Balzac, a generation older, writes from the perspective of a Christian and a believer in traditional values and social order. Zola is an atheist, a humanist, and much more of a revolutionary. He tries to show, not only how people are, but why.

As to their characters, I definitely agree with Rebecca that Zola's works are more "real." Balzac tends to get carried away; his characters become caricatures (not unlike Dickens) and his plots somewhat melodramatic. But, again like Dickens, he can be extremely entertaining. He writes with a sense of humor you won't find in Zola.

Regarding Balzac's scheming villains, Marion Ayton Crawford, in her introduction to Eugénie Grandet (which I am currently reading) said this:

"Balzac always declares his moral aim: he is concerned to show what damage these people {the social climbers} do to themselves, to the State and to the fabric of society, but generally he enjoys himself so much, has so much sympathy with powerful and ambitious men, relates the doings of his villains with such gusto, that his moral aims are inclined to be overlooked by his readers."

To me the difference is similar to reading Conrad (Zola in this case) after reading his immediate Victorian predecessors (Balzac). There might be some Hardy overlap for both. Both are wonderful writers with valid social concerns, but as steven and rebecca say, that difference in generation is reflected in their writing.

Thanks, Steven and Sassy, for your thoughts about Balzac and Zola. It occurred to me that part of Balzac's traditionalism, if not conservativism, derives from his growing up and writing in the aftermath of the French revolution, whereas Zola grew up and was writing during and in the aftermath of the Second Empire. If you've been through a revolution, I can see that you might want stability. And Balzac certainly parodies the excesses and sense of entitlement of the noble classes.

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!

>52 rebeccanyc:-55 Thanks for the thoughful replies. Something to keep in mind when I approach Balzac.

There is a lot of Balzac about. Keep them coming. Really enjoying your reviews of French Literature.

Interesting comparison made by steven between Balzac and Zola. This strikes me as one of the joys of club read, that we can get different view points on authors and their works and the conversations inspire others to read the books.

I am ambivalent about notes these days, because of the resources on the internet, however it is sometimes more convenient to have them in the book you are reading.

#55 - It's so fascinating to compare the two. They come from opposite poles of experience and religious beliefs, yet often say the same things.

#56 - Very good review--I think we had much the same reaction to the novel. It was perfectly apparent to me too that Herrera was in love with Lucien, but obviously he had the restraint not to push too hard and jeopardize his political ambitions for the youth. His love is the one characteristic that makes him human. I think Herrera's (Collin/Vautrin) incredible patience is one of the things that makes him seem most diabolical to us--that he could wait out the "four years of happiness." In Eugénie Grandet the crafty miser shows similar patience, hatching a scheme that takes five years to develop.

Interesting comment, Barry, about the resources of the internet, but I find it MUCH more convenient to have the notes in the book as I read. I can just flip back to look something up, which doesn't seem like an interruption, as looking something up on the internet would be. I also prefer reading a note by someone with some connection to the author and the work, instead of relying on the vagaries of Wikipedia. And, of course, sometimes I'm reading where I don't have internet access, e.g., on the subway.

Thanks, Steven. I read your review after I wrote mine and I commented (in the Author Theme Reads group) that I think we agreed about a lot. And I agree that Herrera/Vautrin/Collin's patience is definitely diabolical, like a spider spinning its web, but at the same time his ability to think on his feet and turn every situation to his advantage is downright creepy too.

Enjoyed your latest on Balzac. I think notes are quite valuable. Not only do they explain the references, but they help provide context for a new reader. The internet is fine as long as you don't have to waste too much time to find the right kind of info...and you remember what you wanted to look up when you have access.

Also enjoying the discussions comparing Balzac and Zola. Where does Hugo fit in all this?

Another great Balzac review, Rebecca. I have the complete (supposedly) Human Comedy on my Kindle, but this one is not showing up on the contents list, under either name variation. I will need to go in and dig around a bit, I think, as a number of the titles appear to be somewhat different.

Great review of A Harlot High and Low, Rebecca!

Just started News from Heaven. I'm hooked!

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 to (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.

Interesting review, Rebecca-- I too read Kundera years ago and really loved books like the Unbeaerable Lighness of Being -- I think I'll skip this one.

Laughable Loves sounds like something I would like more than you did. Of Kundera's work I've read only The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and that was almost a decade ago. I had intentions of getting back to him for this quarter's Reading Globally theme and even pulled Laughable Loves off the shelf once, but I got sidetracked by Balzac.

My copy has a much more lascivious cover:

I think what I'm saying is that I liked Kundera better when I was younger.

My sentiments exactly. Although looking back now, I think part of it was that for a time he was the "in" thing to read. I don't even remember when I first picked up one of his titles -- I was probably in my late teens, and his foreign sounding name seemed nice to drop in conversations. And to say that you adored his writing sounded cool. Over the years, and many Kundera books (more importantly, many other foreign-sounding name authors) later, my views have changed.

I really enjoy Kundera but I admit I have never read any of his major titles (at least, the titles that everyone seems to have known/read). In fact I find that I do that with most authors and I think it helps. Reading the major titles first always has you come in with bias and someone else's critical thinking. While if you read lesser works, sometimes you discover that those are actually the major works in your perspective. Hence why I love Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs and Last day of a Condemned Man which most people haven't read or even heard of because they are still working on taking Les Miserables off their TBR pile.

Thanks, Jane, Steven, deebee, and lilisin.

Steven, you might like it more. I'm not sure that your cover really reflects the story, but it's certainly, as you say, more lascivious. I think the thing that's sort of depressing about the stories, though, is that the characters don't seem to have more fun with all the sex they're having or thinking about.

deebee, I too remember Kundera being cool, and feeling proud of myself for reading him. Judging by when The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting came out, I would have been in my late 20s and early 30s when I read them, and reading Eastern European (or indeed much global) literature would have been exotic for me.

lilisin, That's a good point about less well known works by authors. I owe it to your Author Theme Reads group that I read Toilers of the Sea by Hugo, without having read anything else by him, but I've since bought Ninety Three and The Man Who Laughs, as they were translated by the same person who translated my edition of TotS. I'm looking forward to reading them -- I can see that my reading year is having a French focus . . .

Oh dear am I too old to start reading Kundera? Enjoyed your review rebecca . I will just have to take that time capsule to land me back to my twenties, when I certainly thought the chase was everything. Come to think of it though, you are never more alive than when the chase is on and so I might still enjoy those short stories.

Barry, I'm sure you're young at heart!

I'm thoroughly enjoying the discussion of the French authors and am feeling inspired to pull some of these titles off the shelf. I have mixed feelings about Kundera. He wrote so many books that it is hard for me to decide if I like him as a whole or not so much. After a while, I started to feel a sameness to some of them. In his later works, I also started to wonder how much was intellectualism for intellectualism's sake.

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.

I have to read The Orientalist! I was intrigued when I read Ali and Nino, because it seemed to delight in a mystery about who was really the author. In addition to Lev Nussimbaum, Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli and the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels were listed as possible authors. It seems like Reiss's book might shed some light on the subject and on the time period that I found so interesting in Ali and Nino.

The Opportune Moment, 1855 sounds interesting too. Where did you find/hear about these two?

Lisa, Reiss definitely tracks down the authorship of Ali and Nino and why there is a mystery about it. I discovered this book (although I had seen it in stores when it came out) because I loved Reiss's The Black Count so much. And I found The Opportune Moment, 1855 while browsing in the Harvard Coop bookstore in Cambridge last fall. I got a great haul from there and the Harvard Bookstore!

Rebecca, you have convinced me that I should pull The Orientalist off the shelf, where it has sat for about eight years. Great review.

Great, Linda! It's a lot of fun.

The Orientalist was very close to the top of my TBR pile and then along comes your review. Will definitely have to start it soon, but in the meantime I am reading two tomes and a book of short stories for relief.

Hadn't heard of The Opportune Moment, 1855 but it sounds terrific. One more for the list!

A great review of The Opportune Moment, 1855 - the first one! Thumbed. I have a couple books by Ourednik and I am expecting both will be weird (Europeana is a list of the events in the 20th century) but I like weird. This one sounds like it has its share of weirdness.

About Kundera - I think I started reading him in my late teens/early 20's and loved his books. I don't know if it's an age thing or if I just read the best ones first but my favorites are the ones I read initially (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, The Joke. Still, I've found his other novels/stories to be entertaining, thoughtful and well-written (well, had issues with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, almost entirely due to that one plotline involving kids and sex). Lately I've been reading his nonfiction and, though they can be repetitive (covers the same authors), his essays are also intelligent and flow well. I do get annoyed at some of the "older depressed intellectuals sleeping with younger, compliant, undeveloped women" plot but that can be found in many books.

Oh, that's interesting that you've read other books by Ourednik; I hadn't hear of him before. I have some of Kundera's essays too, but haven't felt impelled to take them off the shelf. Very funny about the older depressed intellectuals; it does seem to be common . . .

Just dropped in to catch up on the 60-odd posts I've missed and found an abundance of brilliant reviews and interesting conversations!

Thanks for stopping by, Char! I'm blushing!

Enjoyed your review of The Opportune moment A fun but serious novel sounds good to me. I think a new settlement of like minded people is a great story line for a novel and this one is intriguing.

Thanks, Barry. They're not quite as like-minded as the idealistic founder would have liked, however . . .

Lev Nussimbaum sounds like a nice Jewish boy. Fascinated by your review of The Orientalist. And great review of The Opportune Moment, 1855, which does sound fun. I always enjoy catching up here.

Thanks, Dan. Lev was a fascinating -- and sad -- character.

Great reviews of The Opportunist and The Opportune Moment, 1855, Rebecca. You have a good streak going!

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.

A fascinating review Rebecca of what appears to be a difficult book. You seemed to have got much from it as you started by saying it was an amazing book. Perhaps one that you will re-read

A fascinating review of a book that sounds a difficult read, although you seem to have got much from it starting your review by calling it an amazing novel. I see from the information on LT that it was originally published in 1999 and I suppose it has only recently been translated. Is War and War one that you will re-read?

Interesting review of a book that has been on my wishlist for a while. I'm intrigued by books 18 and 19 which are completely new to me.

You've been reading fascinating books lately, rebecca.

Thanks, Barry and deebee.

Barry, War and War was translated in 2006, and I have nothing but admiration for the translator as Krasznahorkai's sentences must have posed more than the usual problems! The question of rereading is a fraught one: I would certainly get more out of it if I read it again, but those unread books on the TBR always call louder to me.

deebee, I have read, bought, or thought about buying many books because of your fascinating reading and reviews, including the next one (because you recommended another book by Sciascia).

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 bleak 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 chilling and cynical. 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.

ETA After I finished this book, which I bought recently because deebee recommended another work by Sciascia on he thread, I discovered, thanks to LT, that I already own another novel by Sciascia. I expect to start it later today.

Great reviews of War and War and Equal Danger, Rebecca. I often find endless stream of thought writing to be difficult to stick with, but your Krasznahorkai excerpts seem fairly readable.

Thanks, Linda. It took me a while to get used to Kraszahorkai's long sentences, but they are definitely readable, as they are full of commas and semicolons that break up the clauses and help the reader along.

I am going to seek out Equal Danger based on that review, Rebecca. I'm tempted by War and War, but it sounds like a big undertaking.

Fabulous review of War and War, Rebecca! I'll be on the lookout for it.

I'm glad that you enjoyed Equal Danger, which I also own, but haven't read yet.

Thanks, Chris and Darryl.

I do think for War and War that you need to be able to dedicate time to it, by which I mean having chunks of time. For me, I had to do a lot of reading at home, rather than on the subway, because I found on the subway I kept checking what station I was at to see if I had time to read a one-sentence, multi-page section. It also helps you keep track of what's going on in the different story lines.

I picked up Equal Danger because deebee had recommended another Sciascia on her thread, and this was one they had at my favorite bookstore. When I went to review it, I discovered I've had another one on the TBR since 2008!

I am not sure that I could get through War and War, but Equal Danger sounds interesting.

#100 reading your review of War and War, I was wondering how that might fit you subway riding. Excellent review of War and War, I'm fascinated.

Good to know that you enjoyed your first Sciascia enough to pick up another one of his immediately after. I'm fascinated by your approach to reading, rebecca, no kidding, and very much admire how you can take large doses of an author for a sustained period. I wish I could do that but no matter how much I adore an author, I could never read him or her twice in a row. I need about a year-long interval. That's perhaps why author-themed reads do not work for me! :-(

All excellent reviews and you caught my attention with War and War, it sounds interesting and original.

deebee, It depends on the author, of course. It has to be someone who's very readable, like Zola or Sciascia, or I can't read too much of an author at once. For example, I would love to read more Krasznahorkai, but I know it will be a while before I'm up for it! On the other hand, last year I got on a Beryl Bainbridge kick for a while and ended up ordering most of her books and now they're just sitting on my TBR shelves. I pretty much read what I feel like reading at the time, although when I read too much a lot of one author or country or time period, as I've been doing this year, I feel guilty and think I should be diversifying my reading!

Thanks, Nana, Dan, and MJ.

I also get into reading spurts with certain authors, why not? because if you like one of their books there is more than an even chance you will like the next one.

Congratulations on two (2!) Hot Reviews near the top of the list, Rebecca.

Thanks, Linda, and thanks to all the people who appreciate my reviews!

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

and The Opportune Moment goes on the list!

Nice review of To Each His Own, Rebecca; I've added it to my wish list. NYRB currently has five books by Sciascia; I own two of them, Equal Danger and The Day of the Owl. I definitely want to read The Moro Affair, as I remember the kidnapping and assassination of the Italian Prime Minister in 1978, during my senior year in high school.

I just started The Day of the Owl; I haven't seen the other Sciascia NYRBs in my favorite bookstore, so I will check them out online. This will be the end of my Sciascia reading for the time being -- on to other tempting titles!

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.

Are these Sicilian crime novels anything like the Andrea Camilleri books? Have you ever been to Sicily?

Interesting question, and the short answer is no. Sciascia is really dealing with widespread corruption and collusion across all aspects of Sicilian society through the medium of a crime novel. His novels are dark. The Camilleri mysteries are basically stories about wonderful characters, with a crime thrown in (although the crime often is one of social or political impact). His novels are fun. But on a deeper level, both writers paint a picture of life in Sicily; how true it is I can't say (and no, I've never been there). I can't imagine that Camilleri hasn't read Sciascia and been influenced by him, but their works are quite different from each other.

However, I have found both writers addictive!

Catching up on your great reviews. I have a different title by Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance, that I was hoping to get to this quarter in Reading Globally but didn't make it. I hope it's as rewarding as War and War. Sciascia sound great too.

I'll have to find one of Leonardo Sciascia's books now.

Thanks, Steven. I will read more Krasznahorkai eventually, but definitely needed to take a break from him. RG, the three books I read are all available in NYRB editions.

The Sciascia books really sound interesting. I will try to find one. I have got to finish my taxes first so that I can finish the book I am currently reading.

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 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.

It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past sounds very interesting, Rebecca, but you are surely right that Satter pulls those comments on Russian character, etc. out of a hat. I often hear people make such generalizations concerning Russians - because of their stoical character, or their yearning for tsarist authority figures, or whatever - and I find it a bit insulting. Of the Russians I've met (not many) they certainly didn't conform to these stereotypes at all.

Great review of It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, Rebecca!

Also, Dewald, I've read a lot of Russian literature and there's often a lot of emphasis on the individual.

ETA Once you meet individuals of any group, it's difficult to focus on the stereotypes anyway.

Wonderful reviews, Rebecca. Although all of them sound interesting, I think War and War may be the one calling to me loudest. Interesting comments about It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, and what an apt title! Although I do think the Russian idea of the individual and how that idea impacts political decisions is an interesting question, I dislike conjecture disguised as historical research. Thanks for the informative review.

The title is almost better than the book, and is also, alas, pulled out of a hat.

I think you would enjoy War & War, Lisa, when you are ready for something more demanding. It is surprisingly readable, though. I picked up another Krasznohorkai yesterday, The Melancholy of Resistance, but it will be a while before I get to it.

Insightful review, rebecca. It's a subject I would be interested to read on, but I'm hesitant to pick up an author who easily lends himself to speculation about something as complex as national character. Also, this holding up of the West as moral example, sounds to me, jarring.

Just adding my voice to the chorus - I thought this sounded a really interesting book but it seems like you have read it for me! I very much enjoyed your review.

I'm reading Gulag at the moment and it is remarkable that Stalin is now a more popular figure in Russia than he has been for decades. I think there is definitely a cultural/historical significance in Russia to the idea of a strong, autocratic ruler, from the tsars to Putin. But I found that paragraph you quoted quite objectionable.

Okay, three great Sciascia reviews and not a single one in our library system.

Thanks, everyone.

Deebee, I know. I think the West also has a lot to answer for.

Wandering, glad I could help! Gulag is an astounding book and I couldn't help comparing Applebaum's intellectual rigor and compassion to Satter's approach as I was reading this book. I do think that Russia has not had the experience of democracy, and that democracy can seem messy compared to autocracy but, as I said, I also think Satter conflated the entire communist experience with Stalinist terror.

Too bad, Linda. If you can convince them to get one, I liked To Each His Own best.

Too bad about It Was a Long Time Ago. I had been looking forward to it, but will keep your caveats in mind. His Darkness at Dawn looks interesting.

Excellent review of It was a long time ago.

Thanks, Sassy and Barry. I looked at Darkness at Dawn and it does seem intriguing; I'm just a little leery about Satter now!

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.

Nice review of The Issa Valley, Rebecca.

Thanks, Darryl. It was a beautiful and meaningful book.

I'm so glad you read The Issa Valley. I knew that if you enjoyed Miłosz's writing during an interview, you would really love his novel. Your review makes me want to reread it, but I have several of his other books which I really should get to first.

Which other Milosz books do you have, Lisa?

Let's see, besides Issa Valley, I have

My Century which I started after your wonderful review, but only got halfway through before stalling.

The History of Polish Literature which I read for a course in grad school

The collected poems, 1931-1987 which is lovely. Even though I don't read much poetry, I found his to resonate with me.

The captive mind which is the work of his that I want to read next.

Legends of modernity : essays and letters from occupied Poland, 1942-43 which should be another fascinating read

Lovely review of The Issa Valley It would seem that little happens in the novel and all the magic is in the prose and the thoughts therein. I like those kind of books.

You're absolutely right, Barry, and put that much more poetically than I could have.

I can see that Milosz must go onto my reading list, and soon.

Lisa, thanks for the list. I'm definitely interested in reading The Captive Mind and I've found both a book of Milsosz's poetry (which goes past 1987) and an anthology he edited on Amazon. I'll take a look in some bookstores before I order. I don't read a lot of poetry either; in fact, I haven't read much since I was in high school and college. I know I should remember, but what did you study in grad school?

Thanks for stopping by, Linda!

Excellent review of The Issa Valley, Rebecca. I have had it on my wishlist since Lisa mentioned it, alongside My Century, following your review. I have the anthology that Milsosz edited, A Book of Luminous Things, but have yet to lay my hands on his own poetry.

Yes, that's the anthology I was thinking of getting, Linda. Do you like it? And, thanks.

Thought I posted this earlier, but . . .

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!

>142 rebeccanyc: In a nutshell, Russian and East European history and literature, but it was a long time ago. Hence my collection of Milosz's poetry ends in 1987. :-)

Don't forget to post your review of Smile As They Bow here, so that I can say how fascinating the book sounds.

I thought I had posted it earlier, but it's up there now at #145. I think I must have closed the edit box after I copied it to Reading Globally.

A transvestite religious ceremony... what a strange and varied world we live in! Sounds like an interesting reading experience even if it wasn't great fiction.

>144 rebeccanyc: I have enjoyed it as the type of collection that I occasionally pick up and read from randomly. Milosz selected poems from many different periods and poets. The unifying characteristic is that they are all short, very readable, and what Milosz refers to as realist. It is fairly quiet, yet very visual poetry. Milosz divides it into sections by theme (epiphany, nature, travel, places, people among people, woman's skin, situations, nonattachment, and history) rather than period or country, and provides a brief introduction to each section, as well as to most of the individual poems. This has added greatly to my appreciation by giving hints as to why they were selected and what to look for.

Great reviews R, wonderful review of The Issa Valley.

Steven, it started out with women being involved but over the past several decades transvestites have really taken over.

Linda, thanks. I haven't found it in a bookstore yet, but may order from Amazon.

Dan, thanks. It's a wonderful book.

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. It also shows Maupassant's interest in hypnosis and thus the beginnings of psychoanalysis.

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.

A very nice and useful review. The variety in the stories (notwithstanding the recurrence of prostitutes) sounds appealing.

I wonder about the older translations of Maupassant's stories that are now in the public domain--if they are bowdlerized or otherwise deficient as was the case with translations of Zola and other French authors. With all those prostitutes one would expect this to be the case. Was anything said about this in the introduction to your volume?

There was an introduction by Adam Gopnik which focused on Maupassant's brilliance as a writer, and a translator's note that didn't say much. There isn't much that's explicit in Maupassant (in the stories I read), but the description of the nightingale singing in "A Day in the Country" is enough to make a reader blush given what else is going on!

I'm going back to add something to the review about Maupassant's interests in hypnosis and the beginnings of psychoanalysis.

I remember "The Necklace" from high school English. Sounds like I should renew my brief acquaintance with Guy.

Enjoyed your review, Rebecca! Like Linda, I also remember "The Necklace" from high school, but we read it in Afrikaans. I believe I've also read "The Entity (The Horla)" in some or other old horror compilation.

I did some googling on "Maupassant + bowdlerized" and found plenty of evidence that the contemporary English translations of his works are not only heavily edited but just plain bad. So, as tempting as those free ebooks are, I'll stick with post-1950 translations.

I too also remember The Necklace from high school English (and that was quite a while ago!)

I remember the first time I knowingly came across a bowdlerized version of a poem. A friend in college was student-teaching and showed me the textbook in use for the high school English course he was involved with. I was appalled, and still am. What a travesty to "teach" an expurgated or abridged version of poetry. If it's not appropriate to teach in its original state, then don't teach it. I suppose with regard to translations, some teachers were possibly as ignorant as the students as to what had been removed or "cleaned up".

Strangely enough, I never read "The Necklace" in high school. I have to say it was pretty clear to me where that one was going. Too bad about the bowdlerizing, Steven; that's why for the most part I try to stick to modern translations, because the British, in particular, were notorious for prosecuting works they thought were "obscene."

And Linda, I completely agree with you that either you teach the real thing or you don't teach it at all. And really, the things kids know now are WAY ahead of what I knew at their age!

Good review of The Necklace and other Tales It is a long time since I have read any Maupassant short stories, they were considered a bit risqué in the 1960's.

Rebecca - Just catching up on your thread here. I'm sure you've told us in the past, but I don't remember-- where does your fascination with Russian history come from? Do you have personal or family ties, or . . . ? It's an area of the world that I definitely want to read more about, but never seem to fit in. Have you read Koba the Dread by Martin Amis? I've had that sitting in my TBR pile for a few years--ever since a uni prof highly recommended it.

Hi Joyce, thanks for stopping by. I don't have a real reason for reading a lot of Russian history and literature; I've just gotten drawn into it the more I read. One book leads to another; one author leads to another. I do have a fascination with the sort of "how the world we live in came to be" kind of history, and that led me to read a lot about the 20th century, especially the less savory aspects of it. All my ancestors came from Eastern Europe (Lithuania, Poland) except for one who came from the Alsace region of France, so maybe that has led to my interest in the area, although everyone in my family was always so glad their ancestors left when they did and had no interest int the region. And no, I haven't read Koba the Dread, or any Amis for that matter.

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.

Interesting! That one has been at the top of my TBR for a few years, but I never seem to get to it.

I got it after reading about it in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's In the House of the Interpreter and almost simultaneously reading an enthusiastic review of it here on LT, and I read it now, as I said, because I needed something light for my trip.

Excellent review of The Necklace and Other Tales, Rebecca. Are you planning to read anything else by Maupassant this year? I'd ideally like to read one of his books, but I don't own anything by him.

I agree with your assessment of Three Men in a Boat: "moderately entertaining and moderately charming". I thought that it dragged in spots, as well.

Rebecca, your reviews are always so interesting. You often push me to expand my "list".

Darryl, I have a copy of Maupassant's Alien Hearts in an NYRB edition, and I do plan to read that in the next month or so. Not sure if I'll read anything more by him, as I'm still eager to read more Zola, Hugo, and maybe Balzac, and I can't only read French authors this year!

Nana, sorry about that!

#165 - Thanks for elaborating on your fascination with Russian and Eastern European literature. It's such an interesting part of the world.

Whatever you thoughts about Three Men in a Boat you have to admit that Montmerency is a great name for a dog.

Nothing to be sorry about, Rebecca. I welcome the push.

Colleen

Well, I liked Three Men in a Boat a lot more than you did. Maybe, as a female friend of mine would say, it's a "guy book."

It's true I didn't like it as much as you did, Steven, but I did enjoy it. I wouldn't necessarily categorize it as a "guy book;" I think it's more that I'm not a big fan of slapstick humor or some British humor. As I said, I enjoyed the digressions more than the action.

And thanks, Colleen.

Well personally, I get incredibly frustrated at anything being labeled "for guys" or "for girls." It's absurd. Anyone can like anything. Women are not naturally prone to hate action and men do not naturally hate romance. It simply has to do with individual characteristics and how people are raised.

#177 - Just so there's no misunderstanding, I completely agree with you. It is a friend, the leader of a reading group, who is always making this distinction to explain why she won't read or doesn't like certain books. I won't quote her here any more, even tongue in cheek. As for me, I'm reading Jane Austen while my wife is reading Tom Clancy.

>178 StevenTX: No worries, it's just one of my big "things." There's a pretty awesome site, Feminist Frequency, where the girl has a bunch of videos about various inequality things, and one of the big subjects is how the huge companies always insist everything be aimed at one sex or the other, and Lego just spent $40mil in "research" on how to get girls interested in Lego, and their answer was to create a new Lego series, entirely pink & purple, with new shapely figures rather than the standard mini-figs Lego has been known by for decades, with no emphasis on building, but instead they can cook and go to the salon and junk. So yeah, this is just one of those things that gets under my skin really easily!

179 - I'm with you, altho it is difficult for me to not fall into short cut stereotypes as quick descriptors sometimes.

You must have loved the people who went to the toy stores and switched the voice boxes on the Barbies and Kens, right! That is one of my favorite guerrilla tactics ever. Still makes me giggle to think of the little boys opening their Ken dolls that said "I hate math". If you don't know the story google it - pretty fun.

177 - Steven that's so funny what y'all are reading! My husband and I actually read and skip different parts of some books where we have different interests. He wants the facts about some occurrence, and I want to know about the person's background, why they did what they did. He skips that part. :) When I was teaching gender one of my male students, in defense of gender stereotypes, actually made my point for me when he said those choices are normal -- my dad is chief of police and my mom writes romance novels, he proudly stated. I about choked.

>180 mkboylan: Oh geez! And LOL I hadn't heard about that, that's awesome! :D

>145 rebeccanyc: Wow! That's really fascinating! Thanks for the link to the article.
>180 mkboylan: and 181
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QBv2CFTSWU
It's just a joke merrikay, try not to choke. ;)

Good thing for my keyboard that you warned me! Thanks for the link - that is so freaking funny!

One of my old textbooks carefully explained how we know that women can do math as well as men, using metaanalysis, etc. The new version of the book was missing that part. I asked the author why she took it out. She said it was just outdated and no longer an issue, everyone knows women can do math as well as men. I continued to teach it. It was about a year later that Obama appointed Lawrence Summers.

Very interesting discussion . . . and extremely entertaining morning video watching!

Avid, I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia with that book!

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.

Fine review of Dead Souls. It's been some years since I read it, but I enjoyed it very much. It's a shame Gogol wasn't able to finish it.

Two great reviews, Rebecca! I hope to get to Dead Souls eventually...

Good review -- I read Dead Souls when I was in High School and my major memory of it is being baffled. I should pick it up and read it again.

I have had Dead Souls on my shelf ever since I can remember and have been put off reading it due to the title and an unpromising picture on the front cover. Your fine review makes it sound like fun.

Thanks, Steven, Dewald, Jane, and Barry. I'd had it on my shelves for years too (in fact, I think I first tried to read it in high school, because I can picture the Penguin edition, but I no longer have that copy), and this just seemed like the right time because I was shocked that I'd never read it when I've read so much later Russian literature and everyone seems to owe a debt to it.

Loved your review of Dead Souls.

I've had Dead Souls on my Kindle for quite awhile now. Your review is a great budge for me to get to reading it.

I hadn't even got to the stage of having it on the TBR, but it is a book that has always been in my mind as one I "should" read, which sort of pushed it down a bit. All that is a long way of saying that after reading your review, I think I should a) get it and b) read it. Great cover on your edition, fitting the idea.

ETA Fascinating review of the book on memory. I would like to read him on childhood memory and language, given the need for language in order to formulate memory.

Thanks, Colleen, Linda, and Sassy.

Sassy, he cites research (including observations of his own daughter) in which very young kids can remember certain things that happened to him for a time, and also that parents discussing events with their kids helps them learn how to remember and talk about what they remember. I'm being a little vague about this because I'm not at home with the book at hand.

194 - Sassy there are some interesting ideas about memories and language in the trauma therapy community, e.g. addressing trauma that occurred when clients were preverbal with art therapy, among other methods.

Merrikay, he also has interesting things to say about the validity of the "recovered memory" idea.

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

The writing looks beautiful.

>185 rebeccanyc: (See, I can use personal examples too!)
lol!!

Great review, I have Pieces of Light to read very soon. I hope I find it as fascinating (but less tiresome)!

Oh I enjoyed reading your quotes from An Armenian Sketchbook This sounds like an excellent introduction to the writing of Vasily Grossman. I might be tempted with this one.

Barry, I enjoyed An Armenian Sketchbook but I think it was in large part because I felt I already "knew" Grossman from his other work and could appreciate this more personal book. It is a commitment, because it's such a tome, but you really couldn't do wrong to start with his masterpiece, Life and Fate. Everything Flows is also excellent, and shorter, but even more horrifying and not as easy to read. In the collection of fiction and nonfiction that NYRB titled The Road, "The Hell of Treblinka" is so chilling and so much more stunning than the other pieces that they all fade somewhat in comparison.

I don't think it would be a mistake to read An Armenian Sketchbook first, but I think you would get more out of it if you had read something else by Grossman.

Fabulous review of An Armenian Sketchbook, Rebecca. It is through your reviews that I have been introduced to Grossman's books and I am looking forward to reading several that I have since acquired, with this one added to the top of my wishlist.

It was a moving book, wasn't it? It seems we were both struck by some of the same quotes, which speaks to their descriptive power. Adding my recommendation for this book.

Thanks, Linda and Sassy. Sassy, there were more that I marked, but I didn't want to go overboard. I can't get the sheep and the stones out of my mind. You should post your review on the book page too.

Sketchbook sounds like a wonderful book, in a sad and beautiful way.

I enjoyed Three Men in a Boat, too. It's too bad about the racial remarks, but I generally disregard such things as a product of their times.

I read Dead Souls when I was way too young to really understand it - but I remember enjoying it. Nice review! :)

Thanks for stopping by, Rachel.

Please join me on my new thread, where I will soon be posting my first review.