Rebeccanyc's 2013 Reading, Part 2

Time for Part 2!

47. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox

How do you decipher writing if you don't know anything about the script it's written in and you don't know what language it's in and no Rosetta Stone is available? That was the challenge facing Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist who in 1900 discovered tablets written in what came to be known as Linear B in the Bronze age ruins of the Palace of Minos in Knossos, Crete. The tablets were preserved because the fire that destroyed the palace and its contents in around 1400 BC essentially baked them: Fox quotes Evans as writing "In this way fires -- so fatal elsewhere to historic libraries! -- has acted as a preservative of these earlier records." At the time, these tablets represented the earliest European writing known.

Fox, an obituary writer for the New York Times, tells the tale of how Linear B was deciphered through the stories of three people, two of who are well known: Evans, who found the tablets, and Michael Ventris, a troubled and somewhat dilettantish architect, who eventually deciphered them. For the first time, she also tells the story of Alice Kober, a Brooklyn College classicist who, through patient and careful labor and systematic analysis, made the discoveries that enabled Ventris to solve the mystery; Fox had access to Kober's recently archived papers and believes that had she not died in her 40s she would have solved the mystery of the tablets herself. Ventris himself acknowledged that he used Kober's methods to arrive at his conclusions.

All three people were interesting and obsessed, and though much has already been written about Evans and Ventris, I enjoyed learning about them, as well as about Kober. But what was truly fascinating about this book is how Fox leads the reader through the process of deciphering ancient languages, introducing linguistic comments like inflected languages and bridging syllables as needed. From first showing how to determine if a language is logographic or ideographic (in which each written symbol stands for a whole word or concept), syllabic (in which each symbol stands for a syllable), or alphabetic (in which each symbol stands for an individual sound), to demonstrating the kind of painstaking work Kober undertook to document each instance of each symbol, it's position in a word, and its relationship to symbols on either side, to the role of an intuitive leap in Ventris's eventual success, she presents the kind of thought that goes into what at first seems like an impossible task. I found especially charming how Fox entices the reader into understanding through using the dancing man code from the Sherlock Holmes story as well as something called Blissymbolics. The illustrations of Linear B and Kober's charts are also intriguing

In the end, deciphering Linear B provided new insights into Aegean history, as well as into palace life in ancient Knossos (as the tablets were, unsurprisingly, lists and accountings of food, people, storage vessels, instruments of war, etc.). There is a romance in understanding the people who lived thousands of years before us: as Fox writes, "On the backs of the tablets, those scribes left traces of themselves in the form of fingerprints and even doodles. To look at the tablets even now is to be in the presence of other people -- living, thinking, literate people."

Great review! another book on the wish list- thank you.

Thumbs up for that review. (What else is new?)

Thanks, Cyrel and Linda!

Thumbed you for that great review. It sounds like a good combination of puzzle deconstruction and history. I'm definitely adding this to my obese wish list.

Congratulations on your new thread Rebecca. As usual things off spectacularly with another excellent review on a subject I am blissfully ignorant of, but less blissful after reading your review as I rather think it would be an interesting read.

48. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore

I started reading Montefiore's two-volume history of Stalin with Young Stalin, which comes first chronologically but which he wrote second and which I found absolutely compelling and chilling, because of DieFledermaus's fascinating and comprehensive review last year. There is little I can add to that review, so I'll just note a few comments about my reaction to this book.

Montefiore had access to recently released Soviet archives, and also was able to interview some people who still remembered Stalin, whether because they had been fortunate enough to live to an advanced age or because they had been children of his associates. So even though I knew the broad outlines of Stalin's life from having read the excellent Hitler and Stalin, these added texture to the story. And it is really a story of the magnates (as he calls them) who clustered around Stalin, schemed against their colleagues, tried desperately to stay in Stalin's favor, and endured endless alcohol- and food-filled nights with him -- his court, in other words. It is not a biography of Stalin (and, after a break, because he's a hard man to spend a lot of time with, both in real life and on the pages of a book, I would still like to read a biography that takes advantage of the Soviet archives) and it isn't a history of the tumultuous middle of the 20th century, although history intrudes now and then.

And there, in a nutshell, lies my problem with the book, its strength and its weakness. It is a remarkable accomplishment, and I appreciated the broad outline of what the magnates were like and what happened to them, but I guess I just wasn't that interested in the details of who said what to whom or did what to whom day in and day out (I exaggerate). Things picked up for me a little when the war started, because at least there was a little (!) action. Young Stalin was a real biography of Stalin's early life, and Montefiore integrated the quotations from archives and interview into the story in a very readable way, and I enjoyed (?) that book a lot more than this one. I'm glad I read it, and I certainly learned things I didn't know, but I was glad when it was over.

Thanks for stopping by, Caroline and Paul!

49. Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This is the second volume in the so-called Buru Quartet and it finds young Minke living at the home of his mother-in-law, the remarkable Nyai Ontosoroh, and attempting to pursue a career as a writer/journalist. Like the first volume, it presents a vivid and at times melodramatic portrait of the evils of colonialism and racism, and goes further in this one to also explore the nature of capitalism. Minke is aware that he has much to learn, and in fact is often bemused by what he didn't learn in school, as he still leans towards thinking the "Natives" have a lot to learn from the Europeans (or "Pures"). In many respects, he seems quite naive.

Minke has many "teachers," and the novel often becomes quite didactic as the various journalists, peasants, and revolutionaries (although he doesn't recognize them as such) essentially preach to him. He often comments that these seem like "speeches" or "pamphlets," and indeed they seem that way to the reader too. It is difficult to know whether the author meant them to seem this way, or if he thought that including these more didactic sections was central to the novel.

Many of the characters from the first volume appear in this one too, and much of the plot is a continuation of the stories and conflicts that began there. Aside from that, Minke and Nyai go on a vacation in which Minke is exposed to the exploitation of the peasants by the sugar factories, and Minke encounters a Chinese revolutionary who meets a sorry end and learns about the revolt against Spanish rule in the Philippines that led to the US taking over the colonial role.

When I read the more preachy parts of these two novels, I roll my eyes, get a little bored, and think I won't read the rest of the quartet. But when I get to the parts of the novels where people interact with each other and the plot develops (yet, it still makes the same points about colonialism and racism), I get more caught up in it. Although I clearly have mixed feelings, I probably will eventually read the other two volumes of this quartet.

ETA The best part of this series is what I'm learning about a particular place and time.

Rebecca, as always very insightful and well-written reviews. How do you do that? Were you a lit major?

Thank you, Manuel, for the compliment. I was not a lit major, but I've been a life-long reader, and I have worked as an editor (mostly of scientific material) for most of my career.

>11 rebeccanyc: your review, plus the fact that this book is published in the Penguin Modern Classic edition, makes me want to read it. I am slightly trepidatious about it being part of a quartet though, that's a lot of investment :)

Congrats on the new thread, Rebecca. I always enjoy your reviews.

Thanks, Megan. If you do decide to read these books, you should definitely start with the first one, This Earth of Mankind. And thanks, Rosalita.

ETA Corrected: the first title is This Earth of Mankind, not Child of All Nations.

50. The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez by Sony Lab'ou Tansi

As in the other book I've read by this Congolese author, Life and a Half, time shifts, impossible things happen, and people are pulled by the needs of their bodies. I found this one almost as confusing, just as satiric, and not quite as powerful.

The story begins in Valancia, the former capital (of the country, region?) when the murder of a woman is predicted and then happens. The police, who have to come from the inland capital town, Nsanga-Norda, never arrive -- for 47 years. After the woman, Estina Benta, is killed by her husband, the Lorsa Lopez of the title, lots of other bizarre things happen, including other murders and deaths, but the reader also sees the life of the community and how it struggles for its identity and power. There is a hint of global politics, because the economic life of the nation has been affected by an affront to the US, which has resulted in there being no market for its pineapple crop, and because various European scientists are examining fossils (?) in various rocks and cliffs to try to identify the ancestors of humans. To complicate matters Sony Lab'ou Tansi (a pen name) writes in a dense allusive prose, although he can often be funny.

If I step back and try to look at the themes the author is exploring, I would have to say the big ones are identity, pride, and power, or the lack of it (the coast versus inland, Valencia versus Nsanga-Norda, "Christians" versus Muslims, the responsibilities of members the Founding Line), women versus men (very strong female characters for a male writer -- the women are the heart of the book), and, love, humanity, and respect for our fellow humans. Nonetheless, I was mystified for most of the book.

Excellent reviews as usual, Rebecca. I accidentally received Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar from the History Book Club several years ago, after I forgot to respond to a monthly Featured Selection, but I don't have Young Stalin yet. I'm not sure I'll read this, but if I do I'll start with Young Stalin first.

Child of All Nations sounds mildly interesting, but after your comments about it and The Earth of Mankind I'm not inspired to read The Buru Quartet. (BTW, your link goes to another book with an identical title.)

I read The Antipeople by Sony Lab'ou Tansi, and was less than impressed by it. I doubt that I'll read anything else by him.

Thanks, Darryl -- by the way, I corrected not only the link but the fact that the first title is This Earth of Mankind, not Child of All Nations. If I hadn't read the first one, I wouldn't have read the second one, but now I'm curious enough about what happens to the protagonist and also interested enough in learning more about colonial Indonesia that I'll forgive the flaws in the novels and read the next two volumes.

I look forward to your comments about the latter two novels of The Buru Quartet, Rebecca. I may change my mind about reading the series if you enjoy those books better than the first two.

51. The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola

Food -- piles and piles and displays and displays of meats, chickens, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, salted items, and more -- are the stars of this novel by Zola, which only peripherally involves members of the Rougon-Macquart family: Lisa Quenu, the sister of the unforgettable Gervaise of L'assommoir, and Claude Lantier, an artist who is one of Gervaise's children and who will be the protagonist of The Masterpiece. The protagonist of this novel is Florent Quenu, half-brother of Lisa's husband, has managed to find his way home to Paris after being deported to Devil's Island based on a trumped-up arrest following the coup that initiated the Second Empire in 1851; he is brought to Les Halles on the last leg of his journey by a farming woman taking her vegetables to market who picked him up when he was lying half-dead from exhaustion and hunger by the edge of the road. However, his story (including the back story of his childhood, arrest, and imprisonment) is almost secondary to the descriptions of the foods and operations of the recently opened Les Halles, which stands as a symbol of both bourgeois plenty and decay.

To give the flavor (sorry!) of this:

"All around them the cheeses were stinking. On the two shelves of the back of the stall were huge blocks of butter: Brittany butter overflowing its baskets; Normandy butter wrapped in cloth, looking like models of bellies on to which a sculptor had thrown some wet rags; other blocks, already cut into and looking like high rocks full of valleys and crevices. . . . But for the most part the cheeses stood in piles on the table. There, next to the one pound packs of butter, a gigantic cantal was spread on leaves of white beet, as though split by blows from an axe; then came a golden Cheshire cheese, a gruyere like a wheel falling from some barbarian chariot, some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and as hard as skulls -- which has earned them the name of 'death's heads'. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others. Three bries, on round boards, looked like melancholy moons. p. 210

And so on, for another page!

Florent is appalled by the richness and selfishness of his brother and sister-in-law, and of the charcuterie which they run; he refuses his share of an inheritance, but nevertheless stays with them. Soon, he is persuaded, despite reservations, to take over the job of fish inspector in Les Halles, falls in with some would-be revolutionaries, is the subject of intensive gossip and spying by a slew of local women, spends some time with the painter Claude Lantier and with the farmer who brought him to Paris, and needless to say gets into additional trouble.

But the real subject of the novel is the bourgeois consumer excesses and self-satisfaction of the Second Empire, as symbolized by all the food, in contrast to the the poor, the thin, the revolutionaries, the artists, the farmers, and two teenagers who grew up roaming around Les Halles and making it their home. As Lisa, who prides herself on her respectability, above all, thinks at one point, after hearing Florent talk about going without food for three or more days in the course of his escape:

"But the scornful pout of her lips and her straight unflinching gaze clearly implied that in opinion only a scoundrel could ever go without food in this ill-regulated fashion. A man capable of living without food for three days struck her as a highly dangerous character. Respectable people never put themselves in that position. p. 85

Furthermore, this novel is full of blood and fat: the blood when animals are slaughtered and when the Quenu charcuterie makes blood sausage; the fat of all the foods in the charcuterie and on the financially successful shop owners. Lisa and her peers take pride in their fatness as a sign of their success, and are suspicious of Florent's thinness; Claude Lantier explicitly discusses the conflict between the Fat and the Thin.

The other main aspect of this novel is the level of gossip and spying that goes on. Zola introduces the reader to several different families and individuals who are involved in some way in the business of Les Halles, and many of them seem to be diligently spying on each other and then spreading malicious gossip to cause people to fall out with each other. One woman in particular, Mademoiselle Saget, is a master of this, and also lives high up in a building so that she can see from her window everyone who goes by and what they're doing. Of course, there are "real" spies too, informers for the police.

This was Zola's third Rougon-Macquart novel, and the first in which he made use of the kind of research into the details of an environment or an activity that make some of his other novels so stunning. (I read it now because I'm more or less following the reading order suggested by Zola according to this Wikipedia page.) It paints an unforgettable portrait of the workings of Les Halles, while at the same time criticizing the bourgeois contentment of the Second Empire that made people close their eyes to injustice and economic struggle.

Thanks, Rebecca, for the enjoyable review of The Belly of Paris, which I read with the title The Fat and the Thiin. I read it last year and, you are right, about the excessive discussion of food- particularly meat. It turned me into a quasi-vegetarian. Although because of the heavy imagery, it's one of the most memorable Zola's I've read so far.

Oh, interesting that it was translated that way, Manuel. In fact, The Belly of Paris is a literal translation of the French title Le ventre de Paris, but "The Fat and the Thin" captures an explicit point made in the novel. Some of the meat and poultry parts were pretty disgusting, but the book that (mostly) made me give up red meat was The Omnivore's Dilemma.

That was a meaty and scrumptious review of The Belly of Paris, Rebecca!

Ha ha ha, Darryl. That book seems to bringing out everyone's punny bone.

I just saw Jane's punny comment on your Club Read thread!

LOL punny bone!

Oh, The Riddle of the Labyrinth looks good! Appreciate your thorough review.

52. The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

How do I love this book? Let me count the ways. Smiley creates memorable and believable characters and a vivid sense of a place and a time; she writes in a style that calls to mind the language of Norse sagas yet is eminently readable; she interweaves stories of many different characters over several generations with wonderful pacing; and she creates a real sense of unease and even impending doom.

As the title implies, the novel tells the tales of Europeans living in Greenland towards the end of their settlement there. It is not known why these settlements disappeared in the 14th and 15th centuries after lasting since the 10th century when Norwegians and Icelanders (also, presumably, originally from Norway) first arrived; theories include the coming of the Little Ice Age, increasing conflicts with the Inuit (called "skraelings" by the Greenlanders), and environmental degradation due to agriculture and the cutting down of the few trees that were there. In the novel, there is a severe shortage of wood, winters seem colder than in earlier times, and famine regularly strikes.

All this is background to a saga of a people who, although they lived a long time ago in a harsh and unforgiving environment with limited technology, are not all that different from us in their feelings and behavior. The story focuses on the family and descendents of Asegeir Gunnarson: how they interact with each other and with the larger community of which they are a part. There are many tragedies, both those caused by implacable nature and those caused by human pride and hurt feelings and anger and desire and all the other emotions we are prone too. People die a lot, sometimes through dangerous activities like hunting seals, sometimes in childbirth, sometimes by murder, sometimes by disease or by starving or freezing to death. The characters are vividly portrayed, especially the ones who are in some way different, who don't quite fit the mold, the ones who don't enjoy the social realm and feel more at home in the wilderness with the plants and the animals.

The people know that times are changing: they catch fewer seals and reindeer in the semiannual hunts; the winters are colder; the wood is all gone and people fight over driftwood; the land will only support sheep and not cattle; the lawspeaker no longer remembers all of the laws and takes only one day to recite them instead of the previous three days; ships from Iceland and Norway no longer arrive, and thus there are no replacements for the religious and civic leaders; people's farms (steads) can no longer support them and they have to seek work as servants to others; and more. And yet they stay and figure out ways to survive, because they have no other choice.

Another aspect of this novel is the way it integrates people telling tales and sagas into the novel itself; sometimes, indeed, people tell their own stories as if they were someone else's. And the church, and priests, and a bizarre (and probably crazy) "prophet" play important roles too. As life becomes more challenging, people are more responsive to these gloomy prophecies and more willing to take revenge without the benefit of law.

This is a melancholy book, the story of a dying culture and of people who cannot find happiness. But it is also full of life, full of people who jump from the page, full of people living a life that seems completely realistic although so far away. It is completely absorbing.

I've had this book on my shelves since the late 1980s, and I owe my reading of it now to an enthusiastic review by AnnieMod. Thanks, Annie; this is one of my best reads of the year so far.

Wow, what a great review. I've never heard of this book or this author before, but your review makes it sound fascinating and beautifully written. I think I'd really enjoy this kind of writing, almost like an historical fiction 'deep map'. I'm gonna have to wishlist it!

I must seek out that book (how many times do I say that reading one of your reviews). I am going to read her short biography of Dickens this month.

Thanks to both the Pauls! I read a lot of Jane Smiley back in the 80s and early 90s and she was one of my favorite writers back then. I also found her work to be extremely variable, with some that is great and often wildly funny and satiric, and some that is preachy and borderline unreadable. Incidentally, this book is unlike any of the others I've read.

Oh wow that sounds like a great book!

I think you would like it, Laura.

Jared Diamond discussed the Greenlander settlement in his book Collapse. I haven't read it yet - Jim told me about it. Diamond seems to have distinct opinions as to why the culture failed.

Yes, you're drawing me in with that one too. And the only Jane Smiley I've read-A Thousand Acres-- left me totally underwhelmed. Perhaps it was that I didn't get the King Lear connection at the time (my Shakespeare education has been sadly neglected), but I just thought the story line was forced. I will certainly give Smiley another chance one of these days.

Great review of The Greenlanders, Rebecca!

Linda, although I've read a lot of Jane Smiley, most of it was in the 80s and 90s so I don't remember a lot, but I do know I never read A Thousand Acres. I think my favorites are her more satirical ones, Moo about academia and Horse Heaven (about the horse racing world), and I've been disappointed with most of her more recent work. The Greenlanders is definitely one of her best, if not the best, that I've read.

That's interesting about Jared Diamond, Judy. I think he tends to have "distinct opinions" about whatever he reads about. Based on The Greenlanders, I would say the main causes were the plague in Europe (which decreased dramatically and indeed almost to nothing the ships going back and forth to Norway and Iceland), the increasingly cold winters (the coming of the little ice age), and the environmental degradation due largely to grazing animals and cutting trees down. But of course that is Jane Smiley translating what was known in the 80s into fiction.

Thanks, Darryl!

VERY intriguing review indeed! I might give Smiley another try - read A Thousand Acres and found it totally boring.

53. Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

In her introduction to the edition I read, Francine Prose calls this book "strange" (she used to teach a course on Strange Books). It is not only strange, but creepy too, and the boundary between reality and imagination is so fluid I often wasn't sure what was really taking place and what was only happening in the troubled 17-year-old mind of the protagonist, Natalie Waite.

The reader meets Natalie as she is on the verge of heading off to a progressive women-only college selected for her by her pompous, overbearing writer father. But in the first part of the novel she is still at home, given writing assignments critiqued each morning by her father and lectured to about the futility of happiness in marriage by her depressed, defeated, and somewhat alcoholic mother on the occasion of her father throwing yet another cocktail party for his friends and "friends." One of the guests at that party lures Natalie into the woods and something sexual does or doesn't happen -- the reader doesn't know. All the time Natalie is living at home she also has an ongoing conversation in her mind with a police detective who suspects her of murder.

In the second part of the novel, Natalie is at college, which gives Jackson the opportunity to skewer the pretensions of this particular type of academia -- professors (all male!), students (and, oh, there are some sweetly vicious ones), and the decor and rituals of dorm (house) living. Natalie fails to make friends, although two "popular" girls make use of her eagerness for friendship, and she becomes interested in and friendly with the wife, a former student only four years older than her, of her English professor. She resists going home, but does for Thanksgiving, and notes that through all her letters home only her mother realized how lonely she was, not her father.

The third part of the novel is utterly confounding, as Natalie returns to college part of the way through the Thanksgiving weekend and meets up with her one friend, a girl named Tony. They may or may not have a sexual relationship. Indeed, as they spend a day in the local town and then take a bus that winds it way out of town, I must confess I couldn't tell whether Tony was real or a figment of Natalie's fevered imagination as she struggles with a psychological breakdown.

For this book, as far as I can tell, is really about what is going on in Natalie's mind, and it is in someways a "typical" adolescent mind and in some ways a deeply troubled one. At one point Natalie imagines the houses and people at the college being dollhouses filled with dolls that she can pick up and take apart and crush. There's a lot that's creepy in this book, and very little that is told outright, starting with Natalie's relationship with her father and the imagined conversations with the detective, continuing with the way students go in and out of other students' rooms secretly, and winding up with the strange friendship with Tony. There's a lot that's symbolic too, from Natalie enjoying time in the garden at the beginning of the novel, then being lured under some trees by her father's guest at the cocktail party, and finally winding up lost/abandoned in some woods.

I am really not sure what to make of this novel, and have little idea of what was real and what was not, but Jackson is a brilliant writer. She pinpoints the foibles of her characters, satirizes the pretensions of the college, and gets inside Natalie's head in an uncanny way. The last section is so strange but so compelling that I could barely put the book down, even though I was totally mystified. I would definitely be interested in knowing what other readers think about this book.

The Greenlanders looks compelling, and reminded me too of Collapse by Jared Diamond, which I have but set aside partway through, some time ago. I was creeped out for life by The Lottery, and quality writing isn’t sufficient compensation.

54. The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth

Although this book wasn't what I expected to be, for the most part I found it interesting, if a little more detailed in places than I would have liked. At the beginning, Huth, a Harvard physics professor, talks about how technology has lessened our abilities to navigate by the stars, predict the weather, use compasses, etc. I thought this book would help me learn techniques for finding my way. Huth notes he taught a course on this topic, and gave his students some practical assignments, so I thought, or hoped, some of them would find their way into the book.

Instead, Huth has written a comprehensive book, heavy on the physics (not surprisingly) but with helpful illustrations, that covers everything from ancient navigation techniques to how people get lost to maps and compasses; the stars, the sun, and the moon; latitude and longitude; weather and storms; waves, tides, and currents; and the construction of hulls and sails. As can be seen, the book focuses more on ocean navigation than on finding one's way on land. Throughout, Huth stresses how vital sustained observation and practice are, and how navigators need to cross-check information obtained in different ways, especially if one reading or interpretation is unexpected.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book for me were the discussions of ancient feats of navigation, especially by the Norse and by Pacific Islanders, and also later, not always successful, feats of Arctic exploration. It is a remarkable testament to the human ability to observe, interpret, and remember patterns of stars, waves, weather, etc., that can be put to practical use. Needless to say, this information and practice are also important in military training.

I didn't attempt to study most of the topics in the book, but instead tried to get a flavor of what Huth was talking about; this was especially true for the sections about navigating by the stars, observing the relative height of the sun at noon, and understanding cloud patterns and what they reveal about weather. By the time I got to the last chapters about boat construction, I was skimming. On the other hand, I found the very limited practical information interesting, such as how big an angle of the sky your hand covers when you hold a fist out at the end of an outstretched arm. Of course, I am unlikely to use this information, but if someone were to condense a handbook of do-it-yourself techniques from the mass of physical information in this book, I would buy it.

I think I might buy that condensed version too! That would be fun stuff to know. Bill McKibben writes about that loss in The End of Nature also - I was surprised, didn't realize that was what he was going to write about, thought it was going to be more gloom and doomy. Just sad, perhaps at some point catastrophic, to lose that knowledge.

ETA: I think about that when I'm traveling. You know, like, "If I lived here I would have known they have rain many afternoons in t he summer rather than summer drought like we have in California." or maybe I could simply have been observant and put two and two together, like all the beautiful green, and the shelters over picnic tables in every park. And maybe I wouldn't have been stuck on a lake that time rowing against the afternoon winds! Lots of lost important info!

Merrikay, I probably misstated that about a "condensed" version as I didn't really mean material from this book but a more practical handbook altogether. But you are right about the lost important skills-- everyone just checks their smart phones!

I do wonder what other books ended up on the reading list of a course entitled "Strange Books"??

Shall have to bump The Greenlanders up the list, in spite of the bleak setting. I remember reading a book that involved, as one plot element, the earlier settlement of Greenland by folks from Iceland.

Re the Stalin books: I shall probably read The Court of the Red Tsar first; I'm more curious at this point about his time in power than his youth, which I feel (quite possibly inaccurately) that I can imagine based on the basic info that I have. I've read Figes, Applebaum, and other tomes about the Stalinist years, and would like to come at the era squarely, by reading about the man who created it.

You make The Greenlanders sound very appealing--I have wishlisted it.

Thanks for stopping by, Suzanne and Rhonda.

Suzanne, Prose didn't actually teach Hangsaman in her course because she read it after she taught the course. She mentions "starting with the stories of Gogol and Kleist and ending with Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten and Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles."

Re Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar is less about Stalin, and more about his "court," and only minimally gets into the big historic events of the period. Its strongest point is that it makes use of the newly opened Soviet archives, but I'm still waiting for a better biography that makes use of them. I haven't read Figes, but have read Applebaum, and other works.

I really can't recommend The Greenlanders highly enough! Do you remember the other novel you read, Suzanne?

I'm trying to, Rebecca. I think it was an old historical novel, possibly Avalon by Anya Seton. I know I have that still kicking around (first read it when I was 10, haven't reread it in at least 30 years) so I'll try to check.

Too bad about this being a group bio....

Nice review of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, Rebecca. That's definitely one for the wish list.

55. Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane

In this brief but powerful book, Samba Diallo, the son of an important leader of the Diallobé in Senegal, goes first to a local Islamic school, where he studies with a man known as the Teacher of the Diallobé, then to the school set up by the French colonial administration, and finally on to college in Paris. While the novella focuses on Samba (whose schooling, apparently, was a lot like that of the author), it is really a philosophical novel, consisting of multiple conversations about Islamic beliefs versus those of the west. Through these conversations, the Islamic beliefs are presented as a beautiful way of living in the world, of interacting with other people, and of approaching death, while western philosophies and actions are divorced from meaning and from faith, materialistic, and atheistic. Although this could appear didactic or oversimplified, in the context of the novel the conversations appear completely realistic and thoughtful. In essence, the novella confronts the European conquest of Africa with ideas as well as bullets, leading Africans to become estranged from their own history and cultures.

Although this is fundamentally a philosophical novel (how French, one might say), the author has created memorable characters and situations, both in Africa and in France, and a portrait of a time when African leaders had a real choice to make about how to deal with the west. Of course, that choice still continues, and not only in Africa.

56. The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz

Grosz, a psychoanalyst based in London, presents brief portraits of some of his patients (disguised, of course), exploring both the range of problems that affect his largely middle-class patients and the psychoanalytic process itself. While some of the patients have what might be considered run-of-the-mill problems (although disturbing and painful for them, of course), others have more interesting stories. And stories are what these are: stories of how the past (and sometimes the future) make trouble for us in the present. (Grosz also gives examples from literature.) Perhaps more interesting was the insight Grosz gives into how psychoanalysts work, what they listen for, what they have to struggle with themselves, how something unexpected can create understanding. I found this book for the most part deeply moving, and very well written, but not as illuminating as I might have hoped.

Way back on your last thread: I am so glad you wanted to smack Jude. I wanted to flat out deck him.

You're getting a fair bit of Zola under your belt, aren't you!

I wanted to smack Sue more than Jude, Tui!

Yes, I"m working my way through the Rougon-Macquart cycle with the titles that are in relatively recent English translation. So far, none of them have reached the level of Germinal, L'assommoir, and Nana, and some are better than others, but I'm still enjoying them a lot.

I enjoyed your review of The Greenlanders and I've put it on my wish list. Thanks for a great review, as you do always.

Thanks, Manuel. It's a wonderful book!

>53 rebeccanyc: Yikes...for a second I thought you were speaking about real life people, Rebecca!

Darryl, are you still jet lagged?

57. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

Blood is real, blood is symbolic, blood is red, and blood and redness flow through this collection of rewritten fairy tales. Carter's writing is lush, atmospheric, and often sensual, and her imagination vivid and disturbing, but I didn't enjoy this book as much as I hoped to after reading edwinbcn's recent review.

Needless to say, some of the ten stories work better than others. I was totally caught up in the first, and title, story, a more modern take on the Bluebeard legend, until the end (which, to avoid spoilers, I will not reveal); perhaps it could have been predicted from the beginning of the tale, but I found it contrived and disappointing. I also enjoyed the two Beauty and the Beast stories; one, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," is more literal, and the other, "The Tiger's Bride," much creepier. There are three wolf/werewolf stories, two based on Red Riding Hood, and one, which I found moving, about a girl raised by wolves but then reintroduced to human society, "Wolf-Alice." But the stand-out for me was the humorous "Puss-in-Boots," which I found thoroughly delightful.

Money and wealth and the desire for them and the squandering of them play a role in a few of these stories -- in this, as in other matters, the forms may have changed but human foibles remain the same as in earlier times. But it is redness and blood that really seem to obsess Carter, from the ruby choker necklace (pictured on the cover of my edition) given to each bride of the Bluebeard character, meant to mimic the blood of the aristocrats who were guillotined during the French revolution, to the blood needed by the descendant of Vlad the Impaler in "The Lady of the House of Love," to the menstrual blood that puzzles Wolf-Alice, and more: red cheeks, red mouths, red hoods, and on and on.

Carter's writing is beautiful, if difficult to take in large doses, and I found the collection worth reading for that and for her imagination. But although I am still thinking about this book, I didn't warm to it.

Hi Rebecca. From you review I can see that it's hard to take this book in large doses. I doubt I would want to take it in small doses. Great review though.

Abandoned!

Let the Games Begin/Che la festa cominci by Niccolo Ammaniti

Well, I guess you can't tell a book by the blurbs on the cover, which proclaimed this book "wildly entertaining . . .laugh-out-loud fun" by a "master story-teller." Sounded like just what I needed. NOT! I lasted about 40 pages of adolescent male humor and gave up.

>60 rebeccanyc:: wow, you don't give up on a book often, Rebecca. It must have been pretty awful.

Wonderful review of The Bloody Chamber! I can see where different readers will have different favorite stories but like you mentioned, Carter's writing is beautiful! I read one story a night over a number of nights, but by the end even that seems to be too compressed a reading time-frame for these stories. I started paying to much attention to the similarities and possible common themes between the stories and stopped appreciating each one independently on its own merits.

I think you captured the essence of Angela Carter in your review. Beautiful writing but difficult to take in large doses. I can admire her work but struggle very much to like it.

Thanks, Manuel, Lori, and Paul!

Laura, there are two reasons why I rarely don't finish a book. One is that over the years I've gotten pretty good at selecting books that I'm reasonably sure I'll like. The other is that while there are lots of books that I'm not wild about, I can usually find enough that's interesting about them to want to keep on reading. But this one falls into the too many books, too little time category.

"adolescent male humor'---I'd have given up too. Onward, and inevitably, upward! I may give the Carter a try one of these days...I find I usually do much better with story collections if I don't read them in a bunch. Spreading them out seems to work better for me. I have an ER collection I need to get to, and I think I'll read JUST ONE story from it tonight.

I'm applying that standard (the books/time ratio) when it comes to book de-acquisition, and as I age, I'm getting tougher about it. Like you, I think I'm reasonably good at predicting whether or not I'll like something, but then I bump into something I've requested from Amazon Vine that proves to be disappointing and I'm stuck with it... It often tends to be when I am taking a flyer on a new author that this occurs.

Nice review of THe Bloody Chamber. I have been meaning to read it, after reading about Carter in Rushdie's Joseph Anton.

Wow! What did Rushdie say about Carter?

He adored Carter. I looked online and found a piece he wrote after her death: It's here

And just because it's easy to cut and paste:

"I first met Angela Carter at a dinner in honor of the Chilean writer Jose Donoso at the home of Liz Calder, who then published all of us. My first novel was soon to be published; it was the time of Angela's darkest novel, "The Passion of New Eve." And I was a great fan. Mr. Donoso arrived looking like a Hispanic Buffalo Bill, complete with silver goatee, fringed jacket and cowboy boots, and proceeded, as I saw it, to patronize Angela terribly. His apparent ignorance of her work provoked me into a long expostulation in which I informed him that the woman he was talking to was the most brilliant writer in England. Angela liked that. By the end of the evening, we liked each other, too. That was almost 18 years ago. She was the first great writer I ever met, and she was one of the best, most loyal, most truth-telling, most inspiring friends anyone could ever have. I cannot bear it that she is dead.

After we heard about the cancer, I rang her up and we talked about it. I said, "Angela, there's only one thing for it. You've just got to beat it, that's all." "Yeah," she said in a long, black drawl, "but what about my strong streak of Oriental fatalism?" I said: "No, listen. I'm the Oriental in this family. Would you please leave the fatalism to me, and just bloody well win ?" "Oh," she said, as if somebody had just surprised her with a good suggestion, "O.K." And then she fought like the very devil, fought death with all her strength and all her courage, but also with her wit, her humor, her sense of its ridiculousness, her anger. Death snarled at her and she gave it the finger. Death tore at her and she stuck out her tongue. And in the end she lost. But she also won, because in her furious laughter, in her blazing satirizing of her own dying, her deflation of what Henry James so pompously entitled the "Distinguished Thing," she cut death down to size: no distinguished thing, but a grubby little murderous clown. After showing us how to write, after helping us to see how to live, she showed us how to die.

I repeat: Angela Carter was a great writer. I repeat this because in spite of her worldwide reputation, here in Britain she somehow never quite had her due. Of course, many writers knew that she was that rare thing, a real one-off, nothing like her on the planet; and so did many bewitched, inspired readers. But for some reason she was not placed where she belonged -- at the center of the literature of her time, at the heart. Now that she's dead, I have no doubt that the size of her achievement will rapidly become plain. How sad that writers must die before we grant them their place in the pantheon. Of course, Angela Carter knew who she was. But we could have told her, more loudly and more often than we did, that we knew too. "

What wonderful language. "Death snarled at her and she gave it the finger"; and "a grubby little murderous clown". Wow. Clearly, I have to get back to Joseph Anton pronto.

Thanks so much for finding and posting that, Rhonda. I haven't read Rushdie in many years, but that's a lovely, human tribute.

58. Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is a visionary and and an idealist, and apparently a very successful and well known computer scientist, although I had never heard of him until I read about this book in a review of another one. Much of this book is speculative about the world we will live in when computers and networks become even more ubiquitous than they are now, and while I found some of that both whimsical and provocative, I was more interested in the ideas Lanier focuses on. The key ones, as far as I can tell, because much of his writing is digressive (and at times repetitive) are as follows.

1. We have been seduced by the "fake free," which as resulted in the loss (so far) of many middle class jobs. He cites the example of the music industry (he is also a musician and composer), in which the rise of online music in its various forms has resulted in a drastic reduction in record label jobs, music publishing jobs, record store jobs, etc., as well as in the diminution of copyright protections and payments to musicians when their music is played; for the musicians themselves, this has led to their largely being able to make money only when they perform live, a lifestyle which is possible only for those who are childless and have other means of support (e.g., parents). He extrapolates from this not only to other creative fields, such as writing books and making films, but, ultimately, also to manufacturing (when people will be able to "print" out most of what they need on home 3-D "printers" from design files available free on the internet, buying only the "goop" they need as input), and to medical care, with robots providing many personal care functions. The issue he raises is economic: how will people get paid for their work when it is being distributed for free or performed by machines?

"The idea that mankind's information should be made free is idealistic, and undeniably popular, but information wouldn't need to be free if no one were impoverished. As software and networks become more and more important, we can either be moving towards free information in the midst of insecurity for almost everyone, or toward paid information with a stronger middle class than ever before. The former might seem more ideal in the abstract, but the latter is the more realistic path to lasting democracy and dignity." p. 9

2. We have also been seduced by "Siren Servers," the huge online companies to which we willingly provide all sorts of personal information (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, and others, including large financial institutions and other businesses) while they ruthlessly "spy" on us, collecting, collating, analyzing the information we provide to provide economic value to themselves. He goes on at some length about how they do this and how they can do it.

3. Back in the pre-internet era, in 1960, a computer scientist named Ted Nelson proposed a system, then not technically possible, with two-way links, so that the link would not just connect to something but would also connect back to the person who had created the information. Although this system was not implemented with our current internet, Lanier believes it is both technically possible and a way to, in the future, implement a "nanopayment" system in which people get paid every time someone uses something online that they created, whether it is a song, or a book, or a video, or a file so someone can print out a new dress or a new pair of pants, or whatever we may dream of or not even imagine right now.

"In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it.

That would mean you'd know all the websites that point to yours. It would mean you'd know all the financiers who had leveraged your mortgage. It would mean you'd know all the videos that used your music.

Two-way linking would preserve context. It's a small, simple change in how online information would be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for culture and the economy." p. 227

4. Lanier's focus is on keeping human beings at the center of technology ("Belief in the specialness of people is a minority position in the tech world, and I would like that to change"), and in creating an economic system in which there are fewer economic "stars" and more of a bell curve of successful people -- i.e., a strong middle class with minimal extremes of wealth and poverty. He believes in people having economic "dignity." I cannot evaluate either his economics or his technical vision, but this certainly seems desirable from the standpoint of stable economies and stable politics.

5. Lanier also addresses the creepiness factor. "All three creepy vexations -- privacy, identity, and security -- have ancient pedigrees but have been made catastrophically more confusing by big data and network effects." This is one of the places where his idealism comes in, as he believes that a "fundamental economic model" that is structured to reduce the motivations for creepiness will result in "legit companies and professionals" not doing creepy things even thought there will be more and more reasons for people to want to accede to being tracked. As one of his subheadings says, "The Creepiness Is Not in the Tech, but in the Power We Grant to Siren Servers," which he sees as "soft blackmail."

All in all, this is a provocative book. Lanier has garnered both lots of praise and lots of criticism for it, as can be seen in the comments on this New York Times piece. But a reader doesn't have to agree with all his speculation about the future to see the very real problems he describes and to ponder the solutions he proposes.

59. Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

Maureen/Marie. Melissa/Chloe. Shannan/Angelina. Megan/Lexi. Amber/Carolina. These five young women were lost long before they turned to prostitution and were murdered and dumped along a lonely Long Island road by a still unknown serial killer.

To document these women's lives, both their childhoods and their transition to prostitution, Kolker, a journalist, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with their families and friends. The reader sees the chaos of their economic and social lives; largely from working class communities, often communities from which jobs had fled, they experienced fractured families, occasional abuse, and constant worry about how to pay the bills. They dreamed of something better and prostitution, especially in the era of the internet when they could write their own ads and not owe anything to a pimp or a madam, offered the promise of making more money than they ever could at whatever minimum wage jobs they could manage to get. Of course, the anonymity of obtaining clients over the internet and through cell phone calls has its dangers too: a prostitute can't use her street smarts to sense when a client is weird or scary. And, with drugs so much a part of the scene, many fell into drug abuse too. The first part of the book, and the more powerful, is devoted to their stories.

In the second part of the book, Kolker examines the discovery of the bodies, the investigation (possibly bungled), the media onslaught, the bonding of the families (through Facebook and in real life) and then their unbonding, and some of the people who lived in the remote, gated community of Oak Beach, a marshy barrier island near some of New York's popular beaches, where the bodies were found. He also looks at some of the thinking about serial killers and why they often kill prostitutes. While interesting, I didn't find this as compelling as the first part.

At the end of the book, Kolker rightly notes:

"The demand for commercial sex will never go away. Neither will the Internet; they're stuck with each other. It may no longer even matter anymore whether the sale of sex among consenting adults is wrong or right, immoral or empowering. What's clear is that no good can come from pretending that the people who participate in prostitution don't exist. That, after all, is what the killer was counting on." p. 381

I have a quibble. At one point, Kolker discusses drug addicts hanging around Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village, and notes that the area has become gentrified and that the park even has a playground. I lived a few blocks from there in the late 70s and early 80s, long before it became gentrified, and there was a playground in the park back then. It's where the poor people who used to live around there took their kids, despite the addicts in the park; where else were they to go? My point is that if Kolker shades his information in this case with which I'm personally familiar, how is a reader to know where else he might be shading information?

The book was enhanced by some excellent maps.

The case remains unsolved, the murderer still at large.

60. Dersu the Trapper by V. K. Arseniev

I found this book fascinating on many levels, and much richer and deeper than the Kurosawa movie which I enjoyed when I saw it some years ago. I was spurred to get the book by references to it in Ian Frazier's wonderful Travels in Siberia. The book is an adventure story, an exploration of a remote rugged area and its plants, animals, and people, and a portrait of a remarkable man, Dersu.

In 1902, and again in 1906 and 1907, V. N. Arseniev was sent by the Russian government to make a geographic survey of the area north of Vladivostok and thus on the strip of Russia that drops down to the borders with China and Korea. "My duties included the making of a reconnaissance of the the chief rivers and of the central watershed, the range called Sihoté-Alin, which dominates the province. My orders covered the study of the zoology and botany of the district, and of the natives, both aborigines and immigrant." He was accompanied by some assistants and by some soldiers, along with pack horses. In the course of their work, they were confronted by many, often life-threatening, challenges, including predominantly weather and difficult terrain (both land and rivers), but also wild animals (including biting flies) and people.

However, they had the amazingly good fortune to very quickly run into Dersu (who actually found them), a native of the Gold(i) people, now apparently known as the Nanai. He and Arnseniev hit it off, and Dersu ended up accompanying them on the 1902 expedition and then, through another stroke of fate, on the later ones. Dersu had lived in the area for all his life, hunting and trapping, especially following an outbreak of smallpox that had killed his family. He was completely attuned to life outdoors, noticing and interpreting the smallest clues about weather, animals, and people. He could see a track in the ground and disturbance of nearby plants and tell what kind of person had been there, how long ago, what he was carrying, and more. He was a man of action, as when he more than once saved Arseniev's life, including building a shelter from reeds when a blizzard was coming in (highlighted int he movie), and a man of philosophy (he humanized all the animals, calling them "men," and he talked to them, and he also believed in not killing more animals than one needs for food and leaving supplies for the next person to use a hut). Arseniev admired him, respected his wisdom and values, and loved him; the reader comes to do so too, and Arseniev as well. They, and the very real hardships and adventures they share, are at the heart of this book.

But it is also a story of exploration, when there were still relatively unmarked lands to map: mountain ranges, rivers, forests, rocky outcrops. Of course, there were people who lived there, both, as Arseniev says, native and immigrant, who could serve as guides, on-trail and off. Most were friendly; some were not. The immigrants included Koreans and Chinese people, and in some cases the Chinese are excoriated for exploiting the native populations. Most people lived in extreme poverty, following traditional means of getting enough from nature to survive (including ingenious traps), although even at the beginning of the 20th century, before all its upheavals and "progress," Arseniev could see that these ways of life were destined to end, largely because of resource exploitation.

" 'All round soon all game end,' commented Dersu. 'Me think ten years, no more wapiti, sable, no more squirrel, all gone.'

It was impossible to disagree with him. In their own country, the Chinese have long since exterminated the game, almost every living thing. All that is left with them are crows, dogs, and rats. Even in their sea they have the trepangs, the crabs, the various shellfish, and all the seaweed. The Pri-Amur country, so rich in forests and wild life, awaits the same fate, if energetic measures be not taken soon to prevent the wholesale slaughter by the Chinese." p. 176

Even discounting his anti-Chinese sentiments (prejudice?), this is a prescient view of what was to happen worldwide later in the century.

Arseniev is entranced by the plants and animals he finds. His lengthy descriptions of the flora of different areas sent me running to Wikipedia to find pictures of some of them. And what remarkable animals: in addition to the wapiti and sable Dersu mentions, tigers, various kinds of deer, wolverines, seals, salmon, birds of all kinds, and more, more more. (Dersu can tell a lot about the weather from bird behavior.) Arseniev's sketchy drawings of some of the birds and other animals enhance the text. He is fascinated by what he sees, and was obviously completely the right person for the Russians to send on this expedition.

This book captures a moment in time. There was a revolution in 1905, and then the one that "shook the world" in 1917. As Jaimy Gordon (!) notes in her excellent introduction, Arseniev died in 1930 with a warrant out for his arrest, and his widow was arrested in 1937 and shot a year later as a Japanese spy. "Among other sagacities," she writes, "Arseniev had the good sense not to live to be old."

I loved this book, and am glad I saw the movie first, as it would have been a disappointment after the book. Kurosawa did a good job of capturing the more dramatic parts of the story, the ones that translate well into film, but he altered the meaning sometimes and made up a wife and son for Arseniev, and expanded the section, when Dersu briefly comes to live with Arseniev in Khabarovsk.

This book does sound fascinating. And thanks for your great review.

And.....it sounds fascinating in so many different ways. Wonderful review.

Netflix and Amazon instant both have the movie.

Nice Review! I've wishlisted it.

Thanks, Judy, Merrikay, and Rhonda! It was a fun and interesting book. Merrikay, when I saw it, I saw it from Netflix. It's a good movie, but the book is so much better.

61. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Unset
(includes The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross)

I bought this book after reading Linda92007's wonderfully comprehensive and insightful review last year and saved it for a summer read when I would have more time to read the tome it is. There is little I can add to her review, so I'll just supply an overview and some of my reactions to the book.

Essentially, this is a trilogy that tells the story of Kristin and her world, 14th century Norway, from the time she is a young child on her father's successful farm to her marriage, in rebellion against her father's wishes, through her life as a wife and mother, and eventually to her turn to religion and death. Through this story, Undset paints a picture of medieval Norway: its natural beauty, its social and political relations, its deep emphasis on religion (with a smattering of the ancient pagan customs), and of course daily life in both the countryside and towns.

What I was most struck by, in addition to the beauty and harshness of the landscape and Undset's easy familiarity with the customs and materials of medieval life (her father was an archaeologist), was Undset's psychological insight. Through the behavior, and to a much lesser extent the thoughts, of her characters, especially but not only Kristin, the reader learns much about their strengths, their challenges, their reactions to the terrible difficulties and heartbreaks of life and death in the 14th century. Kristin herself is a fascinating character who is able to take the responsibilities life throws at her, but although her headstrong nature gets her what she wants initially, it is ultimately at terrible cost to herself and to the people around her. The secondary characters are drawn with just as much skill, although there are so many even more remote characters the book could have really benefited from a chart of families and relationships, especially when the political plotting took place. I could go on and on, but I would just be repeating a lot of what Linda already said.

If this trilogy has a flaw, it is that some of the plotting seems melodramatic, at least to this modern reader, and borderline soap-opera-ish. I mostly found this near the beginning, so perhaps I found myself drawn into the medieval world as the book progressed; certainly, I began to appreciate the overarching pull of religion, even as that seems irrelevant to much of life today. As I often find, people were not so different from us long ago and far away.

I would just add that I read the recent Tina Nunnally translation, which is the only complete English translation.

Lovely review.

I remember I loved the Kristin Lavransdatter-trilogy when I read it as a teenager. I've been reluctant to do a reread because they can be disappointing, but your review made me more confident it's safe to give it a try.

Thanks, Merrikay and JustJoey!

62. Murther & Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies

I'm glad I'd read most of Robertson Davies' earlier work before reading this one, his next to last, not only because it isn't up to them but also because my familiarity with Davies allowed me to recognize some familiar topics and themes that wouldn't be obvious to someone who read this as his or her first Davies. Briefly, and this is no spoiler because it takes place on the first page, Connor Gilmartin is killed by "the Sniffer," aka Randal Allard Going, when he, Gilmartin, finds Allard Going (as he insists on being called) in bed with his wife Esme. His reaction, "My God, Esme, not the Sniffer," seems to be what spurs the Sniffer to pull the cosh out of his walking stick and hit Gilmartin with it, killing him. But, despite being dead, Gilmartin lives on as, presumably, his ghost.

After delightful scenes when the police arrive and at Gilmartin's funeral, the novel changes its focus from the delicious conceit of the ghost observing the man who killed him. As the ghost is determined to follow Going and make his life miserable, he follows him to a film festival that Going, as the film critic for the local newspaper (Gilmartin had been the entertainment editor) is attending. But instead of seeing the obscure and art movies that are being shown, the ghost of Gilmartin sees "films" that he gradually realizes portray the lives of his ancestors, from a plucky Dutch woman fleeing post-revolutionary New York by canoe to a Wesleyan preacher in Wales to struggling Welsh tailors who come to Canada to seek their fortunes, one as a builder, others in other fields, right up to his own father, a literature professor. Many of them experience bankruptcy or alcoholism; others are rigid and religion-bound, repress their sexuality, and can't express their love; others are deceptive in various ways. All this is eye-opening for Gilmartin (if ghosts have eyes to open); he quotes his friend McWearie, the newspaper's religion reporter, as saying "one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own." Later he notes:

"How many children are doomed before they make their entrance into this world to live with fear that lies so deep that they do not recognize it for what it is, having never known anything else? Ghosts cannot weep, or I would weep at what I know now when knowledge comes too late." p. 205

When the film festival ends, so does the ghost of Gilmartin's personal film festival, and the ghost sees, after the familiar "The End," an additional sign that says "Nothing is finished until all is finished." There then remain some scenes with Esme, the Sniffer, McWearie, and various other characters.

The film-told story of Gilmartin's ancestors' lives allows Davies to play with many of his familiar themes -- history, theater, psychology, metaphysics, literature and poetry, journalism, art, deception -- and to use his skills as a story-teller and a satirist with a keen eye for our human foibles and pretensions. All of this made the book worth reading. But, for me, it seemed a little disjointed: it didn't quite hang together as a novel, and there were parts of it that bordered on the tedious. Despite this disappointment, I will eventually get around to reading Davies' last novel, The Cunning Man.

51: Perhaps more interesting was the insight Grosz gives into how psychoanalysts work, what they listen for, what they have to struggle with themselves, how something unexpected can create understanding.
Oh, this would be interesting.

72: Jaron Lanier is a visionary and and an idealist, and apparently a very successful and well known computer scientist, although I had never heard of him
Hmm, I’ve heard of, but not read anything by. Plopped onto the wishlist.

63. Xala by Sembène Ousmane

In this bleak satire of post-colonial Senegal, the protagonist, El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, a leading "businessman" (the quotes are Ousmane's) discovers that he is impotent, or xala, on the night of his wedding to his third wife, the beautiful and young N'Gone. Earlier that day, the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry had installed its very first African president, of which all its members, including El Hadji (a title which signifies he has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), are very proud. El Hadji is a sort of middleman, who buys goods in bulk and then resells them to other businesses, and he has become very rich over the years; he also spends liberally, on cars, chauffeurs, villas for each of his wives, and money for their children.

Needless to say, wives number one and two are not very happy about wife number three (although for different reasons), and so of course they are initially suspected putting on curse on El Hadji to cause his xala. He is distraught about it, naturally, and runs around to various Muslim and African wise men and healers, to no avail. In the meantime, his wives are unhappy, the whole town knows about his problem, and his business, through lack of attention and extravagant spending, is being run into the ground. Eventually a special healer resolves his problem but warns El Hadji that what he has taken away he can give back. The ending seems a little tacked on, but makes the political point of the novel.

I have previously read God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane, which depicted a railway strike in colonial Senegal and the way it empowered the women of the community. In this book, he illustrates the world of post-colonial Senegal, the way some people tried to emulate the French colonists, the corruption, the difficulties of polygamy, the way Islam and traditional religions interact, the interest of some in the younger generation of speaking in Wolof and not in French, and more, while using El Hadji's impotence to stand for the impotence of the Africans in the colonial and post-colonial world and, perhaps, the impotence of men confronted by stronger women. As in the earlier book, Ousmane creates interesting characters.

I was not as impressed by this novella as I was by God's Bits of Wood, but it is a dark take on post-colonial Africa.

Oh railway and strike in one book! How could I resist?

Ouch, hit by multiple book bullets. A great reminder to get back to reading Robertson Davies. I really want to read The Salterton Trilogy. I have heard from devotees that his later books weren't as good, alas... One of my fave memories from college was of having afternoon tea with the Dean of Women and Robertson Davies on my 18th birthday. Really! (His family had owned the local paper in the city I attended university for at least two generations at that point, and the third generation was someone I knew, in my same course of study but a year behind me.) Small, small world.

I've just started reading the Kolker book, and probably will wrap it up tomorrow, and will keep your caveat in mind...

Lanier: must read that. A friend of mine says that nanopayments are technically feasible and personally I think that as we move toward a world where we all individually negotiate our salaries and working conditions (at least, in swathes of the white collar world) as contract work becomes more the norm, this kind of thing will follow. There's a new variant on LinkedIn, called Maven, that seems to be set up in that way -- you are paid small amounts for shared expertise. I'm curious to see whether he offers solutions to the copyright issue, as that strikes me as one of those situations where just saying tsk tsk, don't do that, ultimately won't work. Napster is gone, but we're now multiple generations past that in terms of file sharing, with microfiles being shared and reassembled. I hate it, as someone whose intellectual work product could ultimately be hijacked that way, but I'm not sure what the solution is. It feels like Pandora's box has been opened.

Merrikay, God's Bits of Wood was, in my opinion, a better book than Xala.

Suzanne, thanks for stopping by, and sorry (?) about the book bullets. The Salterton Trilogy is not as complex as the Deptford or Cornish, but it is thoroughly enjoyable. Very cool about meeting Robertson Davies!!!

As I recall, Lanier doesn't directly address copyright, although he bemoans the loss of the traditional protections of music publishing, etc. (and by implication in other fields). Not to trivialize his ideas, but I think he sees nanopayments and two-way linking as the solution to a lot of ills. And yes, I do think Pandora's box has been opened; that's a great way of putting it.

64. Archangel: Fiction by Andrea Barrett

I feel I should like Andrea Barrett's stories better than I do because we have a lot in common. We are about the same age, and were both science majors who also loved literature. And I do like many of her stories, which generally focus on people engaged in scientific activities of various sorts, but I don't usually find myself fully engaged by them.

One of the things I liked about this latest collection of five stories is the way the characters recur in different situations in different stories. For example, in the first story alone, an astronomer mentioned in passing is the protagonist of the second story, a secondary character is the protagonist of the third story, and the protagonist, aged 12, reappears as a young soldier in the last story where he encounters airplanes, which he first saw on an exciting successful test of flight as a child in the first story, used instead as weapons of war. The reappearance of characters made me, as a reader, feel I knew them better and made the stories deeper.

Barret tries to interweave the science with the story, and the scientific activity often seems to parallel the personal story as when, in the last story, a volunteer x-ray technician, in the little known extension of World War I when allied forces intervened in the Russian civil war, can understand how x-rays work and interpret what they show inside bodies, but can't seem to understand the human motivations of the people around her. Or as when, in another story, a young teaching school graduate at a summer field natural history course led by an admired and famous scientist who has become a leading critic of Darwin realizes the validity of the Darwinian theory as she recognizes that her teacher is not the hero she thought he was.

What I'm trying to say is that sometimes Barrett tries too hard to show the analogies. And sometimes the science seems a little too educational and not sufficiently integrated into the stories. But, other times, in a delicate way, Barrett vividly portrays what it means to be a scientist while also showing an understanding of human behavior: the science and the characters click and the stories are moving. I really enjoyed several of them, while one or two left me cold.

Huh. Never heard of her, but this looks interesting, despite your reservations.

65. Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou

I loved the voice of the porcupine: sly, perceptive, funny, even wise at times. The porcupine who relates his memoirs is the harmful double of a man named Kibandi. He tells the reader about his life with his band of porcupines (led by "the governor"), how he became a harmful double (most doubles are helpful) when Kibandi's father initiated him at age 11, and what he had to do as Kibandi's harmful double, namely killing people with his quills ("eating" them in porcupine lingo). Ultimately, and strangely, the porcupine survives after Kibandi dies in a way caused his own murderous life (said to be the result of the needs of his "other self"); usually doubles don't survive their human, and so the porcupine thinks about what this means and what he should do in the future.

While this novella is essentially a fable, based on an African legend, I found it difficult not to also read it as an allegory, with the porcupines and other animals, all of whom have their own communities, standing in for Africans and the "monkey cousins," or people, standing in for the European colonizers. It isn't a perfect analogy, but I did find this provocative. I enjoyed this book a lot, and will look for more of Mabanckou's work.

Rebecca, I agree with your take on Dersu Uzala. I also first saw the Kurosawa movie and was intrigued so I looked for the book and it was difficult to get a copy ( this was before the explosion of ebay, Amazon, etc. when books were more difficult to find). Luckily my daughter was able to procure a copy through the U of Wisconsin library in Madison, when she was attending. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and was taken by Arseniev's prose.

Thanks, Manuel. The edition I read was published in 1996 and I think it had been out of print in English before that. I was able to buy it in a bookstore in 2012.

I thought I had a volume by Andrea Barrett, but LT tells me I don't. Either that, or it never got logged. One of these days... I do tend to prefer novels to short stories. Dunno why; it's not a rational choice.

Suz, I apparently own an Andrea Barrett collection I've never read, but I'm sure I read a different collection of hers that LT tells me I don't own. Go figure! Anyway, I like short stories, but in small doses; I have to mix them up with novels and nonfiction.

I seem to have ended up lately following your thread over here with the 75'ers, as opposed to 'over there' with Club Read. No matter - I like your review of Archangel: Fiction (thumbed!), which certainly looks interesting.

Serendipity (and my dodgy spelling) has led me via touchstones to a very interesting looking account of that forgotten (or never-taught?) chapter at the First World War's end: Anzacs In Arkhangel: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of Russia 1918-19.

That is the setting for the final story in Archangel: Fiction, entitled "Archangel," although that story focuses on US and British soldiers, not the ANZAC ones. I was familiar with other nations' involvement in the Russian civil war from some Russian fiction I've read, but more with the Germans hanging around in southern Russia/the Ukraine from White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov.

My 75 Books thread is an artifact of when I only had one here, before Club Read was started, and since there are people I "know" here who aren't there I keep them both up. But it can be confusing.

66. The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi

The heart of this undoubtedly semi-autobiographical novel is the delightful story of a young boy, Namouss, living in Fez, in Morocco, apparently in the early 1950s. The independence movement against the French is getting underway, but leaves the boy and his family largely untouched in the central part of the book which is told in the third person. However, this story of Namouss's childhood is bookended by the narrator, writing in 1989 in the first person, watching the fall of the Berlin Wall with his aging father and recounting, at the beginning, the tale of his older brother's marriage and, at the end, the impact of the independence movement. Laâbi, a leading Moroccan poet, novelist, and playwright, was imprisoned by the Moroccan government in the post-independence era, and a literary journal he started banned; he lives in exile in France.

The novel poetically captures the sights, sounds, and smells of Fez and its medina (or walled section) and souks, as well as the characters of Namouss's family, including his mother Ghita with her vivid and creative complaints and comments, his hardworking and patient father Driss, and a strange but entertaining uncle, among others. Through "Radio Medina," or word of mouth, everybody knows everything that is happening. The family is Muslim, and so the reader learns about the way women must cover themselves up when nonfamily members are around (in fact, Namouss's mother rarely seems to go out on her own; her husband, a saddlemaker by trade, sends food home for her to cook). The pranks Namouss and his friends engage in are entertaining, and the few trips the family takes outside Fez to the countryside reveal the beauty of the natural landscape.

Namouss is thrilled to go to school and enchanted by learning new words, a poet in the making, no doubt. As the first person narrator says towards the end:

"The sky was never quiet for long in Fez. You only had to bother looking at it. Why did it fascinate me so much since I had never heard the word "poetry" and could only muster "stars" to describe the myriad celestial bodies glistening in the night heavens?

My word hoard was a meager, meager affair. The inability to pin down the objects in my mind and say "you are called this, and you that" infuriated me. And since I have recognized you and named you with my own mouth, come now, stop being so mysterious, follow me. Jump into my pocket and let's go! You will be companions during my journey, my confidantes, and should we encounter danger along the road, you will become the tongue of my cry and the instruments of my courage." p. 204

The residents of Fez apparently think highly of themselves compared to both other Moroccans and the French colonialists. At the very end of the book, the older Namouss imagines his now dead mother saying, about the fall of the Berlin Wall, "A falling wall . . . it can't have been built very solidly. The walls of Fez are still standing after all."

67. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

I read this clever and entertaining satire because some LTers I respect really liked it; I found it enjoyable but afterwards I felt like I had gulped down a big bowl of candy instead of a nutritious meal. Maybe I need that every now and then!

Great review of The Bottom of the Jar, Rebecca. As I mentioned on your Club Read thread I plan to read it next month.

I won't be reading Where'd You Go, Bernadette? though...

>67 banjo123:: I can understand that feeling. It's definitely not your usual fare, Rebecca. But I'm glad you found it entertaining.

68. Morality Play by Barry Unsworth

This brief and beautifully written novel creates such a sense of foreboding from the very first sentence that, about a third of the way through, I could barely put it down. I read it because of a wonderful review by another LTer, and I also marked the section he quotes as one I would have quoted if he hadn't.

Briefly, the story is narrated by a young priest who walks away from his work copying a boring manuscript (a punishable offense) because the birds are singing in the trees and, through chance, joins a wandering, down-on-their-luck group of players. It is the 14th century in England, the plague is mostly but not completely gone and lives on the memories of the survivors, and hereditary lords rule the population. Because their standard plays are not bringing in much money, the group's leader, Martin, convinces them to do a new kind of play, based on what is happening in the town which, as it happens, is the murder of a young boy and the immediate imprisonment of a weaver's daughter for the crime; they will create some of it, borrow some speeches from existing plays, and improvise. As the players seek information by wandering through the town and talking to people, they begin to doubt the official explanation, and their exposition of their doubts, in their performances, leads inexorably to trouble.

Not for one moment as I read this book did I doubt that it was all taking place in the 14th century, in a bleak wintry landscape in which the word of God and the rule of the aristocracy and the ever-present need for money and the very real presence of what they would call sin are always there. But things are changing, both in that world and in the way theater is presented. One of the reasons Martin tries something different, even if he is not conscious of it himself, is that he knows the life of traveling players, as it has been, is doomed. The characters of the different players are fascinating, and the way they work together and at odds with each other, and I was very intrigued by their multiplicity of hand signals for communicating on stage and at other times when speaking would be a bad idea. There is a lot of symbolism in this book as well, some of which undoubtedly went by me, from the real fool (as opposed to the theatrical fool) who nonetheless provides a vital piece of information to a vision of death riding on a horse.

This is not quite a perfect book. I had a suspicion who the real killer was long before the characters did, and the ending seemed a little pulled from a hat and overly convenient. Of the only two female characters in the book with more than a bit role, one is a temporarily reformed prostitute and the other has physical limitations (which I won't detail so as not to spoil the surprise); of course, this is probably reflective of the world of the 14th century. But all in all I loved the world that Unsworth created, the way the world of the theater reflects the outside world, the way disguise and theater create a different kind of power from the power of the church and the lords, and the different masks worn by the players on the "stage" and the "players" in the world. This won't be the last Unsworth I read.

I really liked Morality Play when I read it a number of years ago and it led me to more books by the author. I thought that there might have been a TV series based on the book in England- I'm not sure.

I remember Sacred Hunger crossing my radar screen some time back...I have added both Unsworths to my wishlist now.

Great review of Morality Play, Rebecca! Somehow I missed Barry's review of it last month, but since you both liked it I'll look for it next week.

I have the audiobook of Morality Play and fully intend to 'read' it soon...

Thanks for stopping by everyone, and thanks, Darryl. Linda, I'll probably get Sacred Hunger soon.

69. The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

This heartbreakingly beautiful novel is at once a celebration of human survival and joy, a meditation on the evil and tragedy and sorrow that are also an integral part of life, a vivid description of a time, place, and way of life, and a penetrating look at what it means to be black and a woman in post-slavery but still colonial Guadeloupe. In prose that can be poetic, mythical, and down-to-earth, Simone Schwarz-Bart tells the tale of four generations of women in the Lougandor family. The tale is narrated by the youngest, Télumée, who focuses on her life and that of Toussine, the grandmother who raised her and who is also know as Queen Without a Name. By portraying Télumée's life from her early childhood through young womanhood, love found and love betrayed and lost, foster motherhood, and into old age, Schwarz-Bart also portrays the life of the communities in which she lives.

The women in this book experience a world of contrast: the bliss of love and the heartache when it is no more, the blessing of children and the unbearable pain of their loss, the pleasures of tending their crops and gardens and taking care of their homes and the viciousness of working on the sugar plantations and their factories and in the homes of white colonialists, the richness of the natural world and the poverty of their homes and lives. The beauty and lushness of the landscape, its sounds and smells, are ever-present, mythical tales are interwoven with the story of the Lougandor women, some women are witches and healers, and death is always waiting. Queen Without a Name and her friend, the witch Ma Cia, are fascinating and deep and wise women. This is an intense book, and I had to read it a little bit at a time so as not to be overwhelmed.

Early in the book, soon after Télumée meets her first love, Elie, Queen Without a Name tells her:

" 'My little ember," she'd whisper, 'if you ever get on a horse, keep good hold of the reins so that it's not the horse that rides you.' And as I clung to her, breathing in her nutmeg smell. Queen Without a Name would sigh, caress me, and go on. 'Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn't ride you; you must ride it.' ", pp. 72-73

This metaphor is carried throughout the book, as is another about needing the wind to lift the sails of one's boat and move forward in life no matter how deep and paralyzing the sorrow and the pain. "And so, throughout all her last days, Grandmother was whistling up a wind for me, to fill my sails so I could resume my voyage." In fact, the original tile of the book is "Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle," or "Rain and Wind on Télumée Miracle" ("Miracle" is a nickname she gets late in life).

Schwarz-Bart's writing is so beautiful and so wise that I marked many passages as I read. Here are two.

The Queen to Télumée:

" 'My child, you will feel just like one deceased, your flesh will be dead flesh and you will no longer feel the knife thrusts. And then you will be born again, for life were not good, in spite of everything, the earth would be uninhabited. It must be that something remains after even the greatest sorrows, for men do not want to die before their time. As for you, little coconut flower, don't you bother your head about all that. Your job is to shine now, so shine. And when the day comes that misfortune says to you, Here I am --- then at least you'll have shone.' " pp. 138-139

Télumée reflecting in old age.

"It's a long time now since I left off my battle robe, and a long time since I've been able to hear the battle's din. I am too old, much too old for all that, and the only pleasure left me on earth is to smoke, to smoke my old pipe here in my doorway, curled up on my little stool, in the sea breeze that caresses my old carcass like soothing balm. Sun risen, sun set, I am always there on my little stool, far away, eyes gazing into space, seeking my time through the smoke of my pipe, seeing again all the downpours that have drenched me and the winds that have buffeted me. But rains and winds are nothing if first one star rises for you in the sky, then another, then another as happened to me, who very nearly carried off all the happiness in the world. And even if the stars set, they have shone, and their light still twinkles there where it has come to rest: in your second heart." p. 238

As a side note, one aspect of the language of this book took some getting used to: Schwarz-Bart's characters refer to themselves, proudly, as Negresses and Negroes. The edition I read was just reissued by NYRB, but the translation is the original 1974 one (based on the 1972 French original), and my assumption is that these are literal translations of what Schwarz-Bart wrote, and of how her characters really would have talked, although they sound odd to modern ears.

Sacred Hunger is the only Unsworth book I've read and it is very good. Looks like Morality Play will be next.

I have to agree with you about Bernadette. I read it mainly because it's set in Seattle.

Rebecca - Thank you for reminding me of what a wonderful little novel Morality Play was. I read it in the year it came out or thereabouts and still think it the best of his work. Have an enjoyable weekend. x

Excellent review of The Bridge and Beyond Rebecca. Reading your reviews is always illuminating and a joy- when I don't have much time, like today, I make a point of checking your comments because I know they will be worthwhile my time.

Fabulous review of The Bridge of Beyond, Rebecca! I've added it to my wish list.

Hi Rebecca, I'm catching up.

It's hard to catch up with Rebecca.

115 Lord that is SO freakin true!

Thanks for stopping by, Deborah, Paul, Manuel, Darryl, and Merrikay. I was upstate and trying to avoid my computer for most of the past week, so am just catching up with your comments now.

I'm definitely going to look for Sacred Hunger, although I'll keep your comment in mind, Paul.

Darryl, I think you would like The Bridge of Beyond.

Manuel, thank you (I'm blushing), and you cracked me up with your interchange with Merrikay!

70. The Laughing Man by Victor Hugo

There is nothing funny about either The Laughing Man (the book) or the laughing man (the person) although, in this compelling and horrifying work, Hugo wields a biting wit.
In his epigraph, Hugo writes "The proper title for this book would be 'Aristocracy," and indeed it would, although he brings together a wide-ranging cast of characters, situations, and ideas to indict the pretensions, idiocy, and cruelty of the inherited nobility.

The novel starts with an introduction to two unusual characters, friends and companions ("Ursus was a man. Homo a wolf.") and to the practice of physically deforming children for the entertainment of the rich and powerful. The story itself then begins, with Hugo slowly introducing the reader to the pieces of the puzzle: a boy abandoned on a lonely shore, a shipwreck, and the rescue of an infant girl from a dead mother, as well as the machinations of various kings, a queen, a duchess who is the illegitimate daughter of a king, assorted nobles, and a sleazy schemer of the first order. The boy and the girl were taken in by Ursus, and as time passes they not only participate in what is in essence a traveling show but also fall in love. Through a series of coincidences that would be laughable if they were not so masterfully plotted, disaster (perhaps clothed as opportunity) strikes. I won't write more about the plot so as to avoid spoilers, but will only say that the ending was a tad melodramatic. The novel takes place in the late 1600s and very early 1700s in England.

The plot gives Hugo the opportunity to display his knowledge of a wide range of topics, from weather over the sea and how boats founder on unseen reefs to the way children are mutilated and the national backgrounds of people who do it, from the history of the English monarchy to the sequence of when different titles were created and how they were passed down, from the architecture of the old House of Lords to the details of how it operated and how new peers were installed and admitted into it -- and much much more. Because Hugo is such a good writer, most of the time all this is interesting and not overly digressive.

All of this plays into his great subject, which is the appalling depravity and uselessness of the aristocracy, and the heavy toll they and the powerful in general take on the lives of everyone else. In today's terminology, it is the 1% and the 99% writ large. Examples abound.

Discussing the entertainment habits of the young idle rich, Hugo writes: "The members of the Fun Club, all of the highest aristocracy, used to range through London at a time when all good citizens were asleep, tearing shutters off their hinges, cutting the supply pipes of pumps, knocking holes through beams supporting houses and breaking window panes, particularly in the poorer quarters of the town. It was the rich who were doing this to the poor, so that no complaint was possible. After all, it was just fun. . . .If this was being done by poor people they would be be sent to jail, but it is done by well brought-up young men." p. 155

Ursus commenting on his own knowledge (of medical techniques and social insight): "'I am a wild scholar; they are tame scholars. Doctors harass the learned. False learning is the excrement of true learning.' . . . We do not present Ursus as a man of refinement. He had the effrontery to use words which reflected his thoughts. He had no more taste than Voltaire." p. 253

The laughing man making a speech to the House of Lords: ""What is the father of privilege? It is chance. And what is its son? It is abuse. Neither chance nor abuse is substantial; for each comes a day of reckoning. I come to warn you. I come to denounce to you your happiness: it is made from the the unhappiness of others. You have everything and this everything is formed from the nothing of others." p. 410.

But above all this is a lively and entertaining read. The characters are vivid, the plot unfolds, and I found it hard to put down. There were parts, as I said, that dragged a little, especially the somewhat endless philosophizing about love, and I didn't like this book as much as I loved Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, which I read earlier this year. Even in this book, Hugo's writing about the sea is some of his strongest, as this example shows:

"Shipwreck is the ideal expression of impotence. To be near land and unable to reach it, to be afloat and unable to direct your course, to have your feet on something which appears solid and yet is fragile, to be full of life and full of death at the same time, to be held prisoner in the vast expanses of the sea, to be walled in between the sky and the ocean, to have the infinite overhead like a dungeon, to have round you the immense evasion of the winds and the waves, and to be seized, garrotted and paralysed -- this state of dejection bewilders and infuriates you. . . . A grain of sand in the desert, a flake of foam in the ocean are manifestations of stupefying power. Omnipotence does not take the trouble to conceal its atoms; it turns weakness into strength; it fills nothingness with its All; and it is with the infinitely little that the infinitely great crushes you. It is with drops of water that the ocean grinds you down. You feel yourself a mere plaything. pp. 88-89

The laughing man and others in this book are mere playthings for the rich and powerful.

A note on my edition. When I read Toilers of the Sea, I was impressed by the translator, James Hogarth, and noted that this was the only modern translation of this work. So I looked for him as a translator of other less well-known, and similarly not recently translated, works by Hugo and found this book and Ninety Three, published (posthumously for Hogarth) by a British company called Kennedy & Boyd. I am not sure what to make of this publisher; they have a web site, have published other books, and seem to be an imprint of a larger publishing group. However, the book has a completely plain cover, is sloppily edited (i.e., weird sentence breaks in places, a typo in a chapter heading, and inconsistency in how chapter and section titles are presented). It smells of some kind of vanity press, and yet Hogarth is a wonderful translator and provided helpful notes, and publishing a modern translation of this work is a wonderful service for people who can't read French.

Great review of The Laughing Man. I recently "bought" it (it was free) for my Kindle. I also have Toilers of the Sea on my shelf which I have been wanting to get to for ages. Based on your review I'll probably read Toilers first, though The Laughing Man does sound intriguing.

Loved your review of The Laughing Man and it reminded me that despite Victor Hugo's fame I've read only read two of his books, like most everyone else I assume: Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I am thinking of ordering The Laughing Man.

Thanks, Deborah and Manuel. I did like Toilers of the Sea better. For both, I'd try to get the recent translations rather than the earlier ones (which I'm sure is what you have on your Kindle, Deborah) -- I actually don't know what they're like, but I do know that other early English translations of French works were changed to fit English laws and taste, and don't read as easily as newer ones.

71. Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

novelist Alain Mabanckou is a wonderful writer who captures the voice of his narrator, Broken Glass, and the people whose stories he tells, and whose language flows, and this is true even though he has an unusual way of writing, using only commas as punctuation, so there are in effect no sentences, just paragraphs, and even those "sentences" as paragraphs have no capital letter at the beginning and no period at the end, yet there is never any trouble following along with what Mabanckou is saying, although it may take a little getting used to, and it surely must have been difficult to write that way, as I am finding as I write this paragraph, and equally if not more difficult for the translator to convey the feeling of this writing style in English, so now, because this is not an easy way for me to write, even though I often write long run-on sentences myself, I'm going to stop and write the rest of this review in a more comfortable, for me, style

This is the second book by Mabanckou that I've read, although he wrote it first, and I didn't warm to it quite as much as I did to Memoirs of a Porcupine, although it did grow on me as I was reading it. It is narrated by Broken Glass, a 60-something alcoholic former teacher who now spends nights and days at Credit Gone West, a bar run by his friend, the Stubborn Snail, who has visions of fame and grandeur for what is in essence a dive. Stubborn Snail, because he worries about Broken Glass and because he is seeking publicity, gives Broken Glass a notebook to record the story of the bar. At first, Broken Glass tells the stories that some of the habitués of Credit Gone West feel compelled to tell him, and these stories are generally crude, and often scatological, but nevertheless humorous and understanding of the frailties of humanity and the harshness of life. In the second part, Broken Glass moves into his own story, writing more or less backwards in time, and the reader learns how he wound up losing his job and his wife and ending up more or less broken down hanging out in a seedy bar, despite his love of language and his familiarity with the great works of literature of the world.

For one of the fascinating things about this novel is the way Broken Glass weaves the titles of novels into his narration, as well as references to what happened in some of those novels. To give a feel for this, here is an example:

"they swore he'd be eating boiled potatoes, become a beggar, one of God's bits of wood, sleeping in a barrel, like a certain ancient philosopher, and still the Stubborn Snail stood firm, determined as a chess player, and the years went by in dubious battle, till his envious components got bored of nitpicking, he resisted the confederacy of dunces, and the other barkeepers all called him names . . ." p.19

One of the things I liked about this novel is that it seems that Broken Glass himself got more insight into his life as he wrote about his history -- the same experience the reader is having -- and begins to see that some people, such as the woman who sells him his bicycle chicken, actually care about him (not that this changes the decision he makes towards the end of the book). This is a much more clever and complicated book that it seems at the beginning.

72. Rue du Retour by Abdellatif Laâbi



This harrowing but moving memoir of Laâbi's return from prison, with flashbacks to his experiences as a prisoner, has had many titles. The original French title, "Le chemin des ordalies," means "the path of ordeals," the English title translates as "street of the return," and the title of Laâbi's translation of his own book from French into Arabic is "The Fool of Hope." All of these titles express aspects of the memoir.

Laâbi was imprisoned by the post-colonial Moroccan government for close to ten years for "crimes of opinion," as a leading poet and writer, founder of an influential literary journal, and contributor to a political journal. He was eventually freed because of protests from other countries. At the beginning of his imprisonment, he was tortured, and the descriptions of torture were almost impossible to read, although I felt obliged to because reading about them is not in anywhere the same league as experiencing them. This part, brief though it was, certainly makes one think of all the torture that has taken place throughout history, and that which is happening now, and that which our own government has engaged in.

The memoir intersperses Laâbi's feelings on re-entering the world with his memories of imprisonment, with feelings and thoughts he addresses to his beloved wife, who he refers to as Awdah, which means "return," and with myths and stories. All in all, this is an extremely poetic work, despite the horrors it describes and alludes to, and the complexity of return. Here is part of a letter he sends to his wife while he is imprisoned:

"I dream a lot lately, threatened dreams, wandering, beset by obstacles, but beautiful, restorative glimpses of your presence. So yesterday, I dreamed about Qods (their daughter). She was on my knee, I was teasing her, laughing with her like a madman. Did you realize that dreams end up creating certain atmospheres, turning familiar places into something new. It's like that for me, there are some places I always go back to, a kind of farm near some caves by the sea, a huge Moroccan house which reminds me both of the Alhambra and one of the houses I used to live in, a kind of apartment in a building but open to the sky with doorless rooms. For the most part these places are only different combinations of the same prison-space. Not always, for in some of the dreams I don't feel completely affected by this space. All the same, the capacity to dream is prodigious. And so important for a prisoner." p. 75

One of the peculiarities of this book is that it is written in the second person, that is Laâbi refers, presumably to himself, as "you" throughout, e.g., "You are free," "You open the sack with your name on it," "You reassure yourself," etc. It was not clear to me why Laâbi did this, perhaps as a distancing mechanism, perhaps to allude to the universality of the prison experience, although he is very particular about his own experiences, as a poet would be. Laâbi addresses this in his epilogue:

"More worrying still, this YOU that you consecrated as hero or chief character, who will fall into the trap of believing that it has anything to do with an individual? Will it not be understood as WE? What then have you put of yourself into the mouths of others and what of others into your own mouth? And with what justification?" p. 177

Certainly, despite the horrific cruelty that Laâbi experienced, he was able to go on and write as charming and almost light-hearted a novel based on his childhood as The Bottom of the Jar. That speaks to his ability to somehow separate these vastly different experiences, as well, of course, to his talents as a writer. Towards the end of the memoir, he muses on how he has recovered:

"Little by little you recovered from your astonishments, You rediscovered reflexes that you thought you had lost forever . . .Your astonishment bumped less every day against the rock of realities and good sense. Already there was memory and forgetting. Your new life already had an age.

Then there were the great questions. Not that they had been absent after the first steps you had taken during the starry night of your deliverance. From that instant you had said to yourself: Look at me, returned to the multiple body from which I had been snatched. How shall I find again the land and the people? How shall I create again with my hands their fertility? But now, you had seen. The earth had turned. The rivers had recovered their normal courses. The social puzzle had been fitted together."? p. 163

And finally:

"Free. Old salt of the prison seas. If you are now free, it's because you will carry this citadel for the rest of your life, engraved on your heart." p. 175

Great reviews of Broken Glass, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed, and Rue Du Retour, which I'll add to my wish list.

ETA: I'll probably read Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou this week, and The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laabi before the end of the month. On one hand I wish we had more time to read Francophone literature, but I'm greatly looking forward to the South American literature theme that begins next month.

Thank you for your thoughts on The Laughing Man, Rebecca; I am delighted to hear there is a good modern translation. The 1924 silent film adaptation, The Man Who Laughs, is excellent (though I don't know yet if it's an excellent adaptation!).

Thanks, Darryl. I also have Blue White Red and will read that sometime, not sure when. And I'm looking forward to the South American theme read too; I've been saving books up for that.

And thanks for stopping by, Liz. It took some shopping around to find the edition I read; I think I got it from the Book Depository. Just added the movie to my queue on Netflix and discovered that there's a 2012 movie starring Gerard Depardieu -- not yet available on Netflix though. Somehow, I don't think the recent version would be as good as the earlier one.

The silent version stars Conrad Veidt, who must have really suffered in making it (for reasons you would understand!). I didn't know it had been re-made; I will keep an eye out for that version, thanks.

#122 - clever way of imitating Mabanckou on your first paragraph. But why should I expect anything different from you but being clever?

73. 419 by Will Ferguson

Will Ferguson really tried with this book. He tried to take an inventive but not really exciting thriller plot about the effects of a Nigerian e-mail scam on a Canadian family and make it Meaningful and Important by adding in stories of three people in Nigeria. The Nigerian sections were longer and more compelling, and the characters were better developed, which made the Canadian sections seem less interesting and to some extent tacked on.

There have been a lot of reviews of this book, including one that spurred me to buy it, so I won't go into a lot of details about the plot but will focus more on my reactions to it. Basically, Laura, the daughter of a man who killed himself after he succumbed to a "419" scam (named after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that forbids such scams), becomes obsessed with tracking down the scammer and seeking revenge. Simultaneously, the reader learns about the young scammer, Winston, who comes from an educated background; about Nnamdi, a boy from a Delta village who becomes a young man deeply affected by the oil industry; and Amina, a young woman who is fleeing the northern Sahel region. Needless to say, their paths will converge.

I found it fascinating to learn about the environment and social fabric of the Delta region and beyond, how the development of the oil industry in Nigeria has destroyed these and the economic opportunities for most young people, and how the various aspects of the criminal culture interact. I also enjoyed learning about the different groups that make up Nigeria. As one of the characters says,

" 'There is no Nigeria. . . . "There is Fulani and Hausa, Igbo and Tiv, Efik and Kanuri, Gwari and Yoruba. But Nigeria? That is only the pail we carry these in.' " p.82

Ferguson did a lot of research (detailed in his acknowledgements) and is a very readable writer, but some of the Nigerian material read like he was showing off his research. And I did wonder whether perhaps it was intruding on the story lines, and whether I might have enjoyed another book, perhaps a nonfiction one, that focused on Nigerian issues, more. Also, I found some of the plot development conveniently coincidental and unconvincing. I did find it interesting that Laura was a copy editor, and that she used her copy editing skills to track down the scammer, as I was a copy editor a long time ago; however, when Ferguson wrote that Laura "moved into the lucrative field of freelance copy editing," I had to roll my eyes!

This was a quick read, and mostly enjoyable, although not to my mind prize-worthy (it won the Scotiabank Giller prize for Canadian fiction). I don't feel its flaws outweighed its positive points, but they certainly detracted from the reading experience for me. However, one good thing about reading this book is that it made me more eager to read two other books that have been on my TBR for a while, both by J. G. le Clezio: Onitsha, a town referred to in this book, and Desert, about the Sahel region more generally. I would also be interested in books by Nigerians about some of the issues described in this book.

Nice review of 419, Rebecca; as you probably know, I received an LTER copy of it, and I didn't like it. It was a curious and disappointing choice for the Giller Prize, and I've now become far less interested in that award, after 419 and Half Blood Blues were chosen as recent winners.

I enjoyed Desert and Onitsha by Le Clézio, each of which earned 4-1/2 star ratings from me, so I'll be curious to see what you think of them.

I remember you didn't like it much, Darryl, but Steven gave it an enthusiastic review, and that's what inspired me to buy it when I saw it in a store.

I still have to read it. I wonder how many of the shortcomings are due to the fact that this is one of Ferguson's first attempts at 'serious' fiction? Most of the stuff of his that I've read has been very light and humorous, like Happiness or Why I Hate Canadians.

Too bad about 419, but thanks for the review, which settled my wavering about whether or not to purchase it.

I read a book a couple of years ago (fiction) which involved the issues of the damage caused to the delta area of Nigeria by oil drilling, and the government corruption that enabled it. I think you might like it. I reviewed it on the book's home page: Tides by Isidore Okpewho. (For some reason this book does not come up on the choices, but you can get there by going to the author page I hope)

I also just purchased, but have not read, another novel about the 419 scams, I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. I hope this one, written by a Nigerian, will be better.

I could have sworn I posted a message a few days ago thanking you for those recommendations, Deborah, but either I imagined it or LT ate my post. In any case, I will take a look at both those books.

74. Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, selected and translated by Muireann Maguire

I bought this book when I saw it in the bookstore because I read a lot of Russian, including Soviet era, fiction, and I was intrigued that this collection included stories by writers I knew (such as Bulgakov and Krzhizhanovsky) as well as authors I was unfamiliar with. These writers were taking a chance by not toeing the party line about realistic fiction, and in fact many of these stories were not published in the USSR during the authors' lifetimes and one author, was killed in the 1937 purges. However, although some of the stories were enjoyably creepy and thought-provoking, I guess it takes a lot for me to appreciate tales of the supernatural. I kept on reading because each story was different (although two involved people emerging from mirrors and pushing the "real" person into the mirror), and I kept hoping I would like them more. I believe this is a case of my personal taste, and that the stories would be much more compelling for someone who likes this kind of fiction more than I do.

May I just say how much I love that you know what "toeing the line" really means? Not that I would have expected otherwise, but I can't count the number of times I've seen that written "towing the line".

75. Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe

"When Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by the Pope in St. Peter's in Rome, on Christmas Day in the year 800, Maya civilization was it its height: scattered throughout the jungle-covered lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula were more than a dozen brilliant city-states, with huge populations, towering temple-pyramids and sophisticated royal courts. The arts, scientific learning, and, above all, writing flourished under royal patronage. Maya mathematicians and astronomers scanned the heavens, and tracked the planets as they moved across the background of the stars in the tropical night. Royal scribes --devotees of the twin Monkey-Man Gods -- wrote all this down in their bark-paper books, and inscribed the deeds of their kings, queens, and princes on stone monuments and the walls of their temples and palaces.

Even the mightiest empires have their day and finally crumble, awaiting resurrection by the archaeologist's spade. It was not long after 800 that things began to fall apart for the ancient Maya, who had enjoyed six centuries of prosperity during Europe's Dark Age, and city after city was abandoned to the encroaching forest. Then there was a final brief renaissance of lowland culture in northern Yucatán, to be followed by the final cataclysm brought about at the hands of the white foreigners from across the sea." pp. 48-49

I start with this long excerpt because it sets the stage for Michael Coe's story of how Maya writing was deciphered and because it shows his readable but scholarly approach. I picked up this book, which has sat on my TBR since October 17, 1992, according to the sales slip still inside it, because I recently enjoyed Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth about deciphering Linear B.

The central questions posed by this book are why it took so long to "break" the Maya code and what understanding their writing tells us about the Maya and their lives and preoccupations. In large part, this is an intellectual history of the people who tried to decipher the writing, and one of the enjoyable aspects of the book is the way Coe gently but pointedly describes where they went wrong, as when he remarks, about an extremely influential researcher in the field, "It as though someone were pursing a career in evolutionary biology, and decided to ignore Darwin."

The story of decoding Maya writing is at once a comedy of errors, a tale of opportunities missed and what Coe calls "stumbling blocks," a story of chance serendipities, and a look at the hard work of anthropologists and linguists. Writing can be logographic (using symbols for words or the smallest parts of words, called morphemes), syllabic (with symbols for consonant-vowel combinations), or alphabetic (like ours). At first, Mayan writing was thought to be logographic, although a 16th century Spanish priest, Bishop Landa, wrote down syllabic and alphabetic sounds associated with different glyphs and images; his work was lost for centuries but proved helpful much later in confirming interpretations arrived at using other methods.



Pages from the Dresden codex, one of four Maya books that have survived.



Writing on an 8th century stone monument from Piedras Negras.

By the time Coe, a Yale anthropology professor, wrote this book in 1992, researchers had finally broken the code, learning that although there are glyphs that represent individual people and other words, most of them are syllabic and used in combinations. They were finally able to read the inscriptions on monuments, and thus learned that they were neither all dates (the Mayans had an amazing obsession with dates) or all astronomical observations (ditto), as had been previously hypothesized, but detailed the accession of rulers to power, their genealogical heritage, their capture of prisoners, their somewhat bloody rituals, and more. I have no doubt that in the 20+ years since, much more has been discovered, but this is a fascinating tale of real people and real research, as well as a portrait of very real people who lived more than a thousand years ago. One of the interesting findings to come out of this new understanding is the prestige associated with being a scribe, and their artistic leanings. As Coe writes:

"Now, the ancient Maya scribes could have written everything expressed in their language using only the syllabic signary -- but they did not, any more than did the Japanese with their kana signs, or the Sumerians and Hittites with their syllabaries, or the Egyptians with their stock of consonantal signs. The logograms just had too much prestige to abolish. And why should they have done so? 'One picture is worth a thousand words,' as the saying goes, and Maya logograms, like their Egyptian equivalents, are often remarkably pictorial and thus more immediately informative than a series of abstract phonetic signs: for example, the Maya could, and sometimes did, write out balam, "jaguar," syllabically as ba-la-m(a), but by using a jaguar's head for balam, the scribe could get his word across in a more dramatic fashion. p. 264

Coe lived through a dramatic breakthrough in understanding a fascinating culture and people. This book tells how it happened.

#136, Thank you, Linda, and ugh about "towing the line." My pet peeve is when people write "she was a trooper" when they mean "she was a trouper."
An actress is NOT a cop, although she may play one!

I don’t remember when I read this, probably not too long after its publication. Worth a reread, but too many books... I have an uncle and aunt who do (or did, in the case of the aunt) Mayan linguistics (and who are mentioned in the book).

#138 almost as bad as "a rough road to hoe", which my MIL says a lot!

#137, That's so cool, qebo. Would you mind saying who they are? (You can send me a PM if you don't want to post their names.)

I'll PM.

>>#138

Conversely, I couldn't tell you the number of times I've seen "toe-headed" instead of "tow-headed" - what on earth do they think that expression means!?

#143 Ahhh...we could probably go on like this for days! My boss likes to talk about getting someone to move off "center base". I guess he means FIRST base...

76. Onitsha by J.M.G. Le Clezio

The more I thought about what I should say about this book in my review, the more I realized how complex the novel really is and how much is left unsaid. It starts as the partially autobiographical story of Fintan, a boy who seems to be about 11 or 12 years old, traveling with his Italian mother (whom he calls Maou) by ship from the Atlantic coast of France to Onitsha on the Niger River in Nigeria. It is 1948, the war is over, and Fintan's English father, Geoffroy, whom he has never met, has sent for Maou and Fintan to join him in Onitsha.

The first part of the novel depicts the voyage, which the reader sees through both Fintan's and Maou's eyes, as they enter a foreign world and feel the impact of both the climate and the racist/colonial structure of the society. None of this is didactic; it emerges from the perceptions and actions of the characters. The later parts of the novel take place in and around Onitsha, except for the very end when the family leaves Africa.

In Onitsha, once again, each member of the family reacts to the world in which they find themselves -- Maou and Fintan mostly among the Africans, Geoffroy largely among the colonial English, those engaged in commerce, as he is, and those representing the government. But Geoffroy has another interest, one which drew him to Africa in the first place. He is convinced that the last black queen of Meroë, part of ancient Egypt, led her people up the Nile and across the mountains to found another kingdom on the banks of the Niger, perhaps at a mystical site known as Aro Chuku. (I did a lot of Googling at this point.) His imaginings of this journey, shown in another typeface in my edition, are interspersed with the rest of the novel, and progress as the novel progresses. Geoffroy also comes to think of a mysterious young woman, Ayo, who is unable to speak or hear and whose past is uncertain, as a reincarnation of the long ago black queen.

Meanwhile, Maou irritates the colonial powers by showing her disgust with how they treat the Africans, including a group of prisoners hired to dig a swimming pool while still chained together who carry on their work in sight of a dinner party at the district officer's home. Fintan explores the natural world with a slight older friend, Bony, quickly shedding his shoes and socks to run barefoot over the savannah and rocks; he also is becoming aware of sexuality. A mysterious European, Sabine Rodes, who has an "adopted" African son as his servant, as well as some association with the equally mysterious Ayo, also figures in the story.

Le Clezio's writing is beautiful, and he vividly depicts the very different environment the mixed European family finds itself in, and how they react to it.

"It was the beginning of the rainy season. The big river was the color of lead beneath the clouds, the wind flattened the treetops with violence. Maou no longer left the house in the afternoon. She stayed on the veranda, listening to the rising storms, far off towards the source of the Omerun. Heat crackled the red earth before the rain. The air danced above the tin roofs. From where she sat she could see the river, the islands. She had lost all desire to write, or even to read. She needed only to look, to listen, as if time were of no more importance." pp. 119-120

Beyond the tale of a boy experiencing a new world, and the picture of colonialist racism in action, and the dream-like story of an historic or mythical migration, and the vivid depiction of a time and a place, this book also seems to be about voyages of various kinds, isolation of various kinds, and the urge to write. Geoffroy travels from England to Italy and then to Africa, Maou with her mother and aunt and Fintan from Italy to France and with only Fintan to Africa, the black queen of Meroë from the Nile to the Niger, and finally the family back to England and France. All are alone in a way, finding their place in Africa on their own, Maou and Geoffroy coming from different parts of Europe and leaving their own families behind. And each writes something at some point in the story: Maou letters to Geoffroy, Fintan a story of a girl who takes "a long voyage" to Africa, and Geoffroy his notes about the epic journey of the queen of Meroë. Left unsaid, but looming in the background, are the devastation World War II brought to the Europe they have left and the impending anti-colonial upheavals in the Africa they leave at the end. As the mysterious Sabine Rodes says to Maou:

"Have a good look about you! The days are numbered for all of us, all of us! For good people and bad, for honorable people and for those like me! The empire is finished, signorina, it's crumbling on every side, turning to dust: the great ship of empire is sinking, honorably! You speak of charity, don't you, and your husband lives in his dream world, and meanwhile everything is crumbling around you! But I shan't leave. I shall stay here to see it all, that's my mission, my vocation, to watch the ship go under.", p. 143

(Incidentally, Rodes has already seen a real ship go under in the river, a wreck that figures prominently in the novel.)

At the very end of the book, a now-adult Fintan reflects on how his year in Africa infused his whole life, leaving him with feelings that set him apart from others, and how his experiences there connect him with the then-ongoing war in Biafra.

This is a book that I will continue thinking about for a long time.

Wonderful review, Rebecca. Thank you.

Thanks, Joe, for stopping by, and glad you liked the review.

77. L'Amour by Marguerite Duras

This is the first book I've read by Duras, and what a strange book it is. More impressionistic than a traditional novel, it has a film-like character to it with very spare descriptions of the scene and the actions and little in the way of plot. According to the introduction and afterword, and also a helpful interview with the translators provided by Open Letter, the publisher, with my copy (I am a subscriber), the characters in this novel, referred to as "the woman" or "she," and "the traveler" and "the man who walks," both called, sometimes confusingly, "he," are characters in several other novels and movies in Duras' "India cycle," although it is said this book can be read on its own.

I found it beautiful but mystifying. The language is very simple, very repetitive, and yet poetic. The sentences are often very short, and paragraphs can be one line. Here is an example, almost picked at random.

"She is silent.
The light changes again.
He raise his head, looks in the direction of her gesture; he sees that from the far end of S. Thala, toward the south, the man who walks is returning, making his way through the seagulls, he is returning.
His pace is even.
Like the changing of the light.
Accident.
Again the light: the light. Changes, then suddenly does not change anymore. Brightens, freezes, even, shining. The traveler says:

    --The light

She looks. pp. 8-9

The story, such as it is, takes place in S. Thala, a resort town where the river meets the sea, that is apparently either out of season or has been abandoned. There are empty buildings, fires, sounds reminiscent of parties in times gone by.

Light and darkness, day and night; looking and seeing, looking and not seeing;walking, coming, going, returning, etc.; the beach and the sea; remembering and forgetting; pregnancy, illness, and death; cries and groans -- all of these seem to play a role in this book. It seems, to me anyway, that Duras wanted to strip down her language, allowing readers to visualize in their own minds what is happening, even though much of what is happening is surrealistic and incomprehensible. What comes across is that there was a livelier, happier life for the characters there in S. Thala sometime in the past -- and that something happened to change that so that the characters seem disturbed, or at least very sad.

This was a puzzling read, and I'm not sure if it makes me want to read more Duras or stay far away!

I agree with you completely on Duras. More like scribblings to envision a cinematic experience than a cohesive novel. Hope Sunday finds you well.

Nice to see you here, Paul, and I return the good wishes.

Regarding 419 - ah sometimes ignorance is bliss for those unfamiliar with literary devices. :)

uh oh - trouper? oh hell.

78. Still Midnight by Denise Mina

I wasn't familiar with Denise Mina until RidgewayGirl recommended her enthusiastically on her thread. Having now read this book, the first in a series featuring Glasgow Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, I am not as enthusiastic as she was but I am not completely negative either. In this novel, Alex is unhappy both at home and at work, where she lacks confidence in what her fellow detectives think of her, but is driven to solve the case in which Aamir, an elderly Indian from Uganda, is kidnapped during a home invasion in which the two balaklaved white invaders are looking for someone named Bob -- but there is apparently nobody named Bob in that Indian household. The novel is as much about the somewhat hapless kidnappers as it is about solving the crime, and as it proceeds the reader learns much about their lives and the lives of the family of the kidnapped man, as well as, obliquely, about the history of Aamir's escape from Uganda and the tragedies and complexities of his and Alex's lives. For a while, I felt there was too much in this book and that it detracted from the mystery aspect of it, but I realize Mina is trying to paint a fuller picture of aspects of life in Glasgow. I have mixed feelings about detective fiction that aspires to greater scope and meaning, but I am intrigued enough that I will try something else by Mina at some point.

79. Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou

This is the third book by Mabanckou I've read, but the first he wrote. (It was only translated into English this year.) In it, he takes a look at the lives of Africans who go to live in Paris and the varieties of experiences they have there. It is both a satire of the "Parisians," as they are called, and the prestige which they and their families acquire when they return for visits to their home county (in this case, Congo), and a look at the harsh reality that most undocumented immigrants find when they arrive in the capital of their former colonizer.

The tale starts out with the narrator declaring "I'll manage to get myself out of this" on finding himself imprisoned in a dark cell outside Paris. The scene then shifts back to his village in Congo, where the villagers are all entranced by Moki, a local young man who has done very well for himself in Paris, showering his parents and extended family with expensive gifts including a newly built house complete with water and electricity and two cars that they can use for a taxi service. On his yearly visits home, Moki stresses that speaking French is different from speaking "in French," and he is quite the local dandy, wearing expensive designer clothes and stressing how stylish he is. The narrator, Massala-Massala, is eager to try his luck in Paris too, and Moki arranges for him to get a passport and a tourist visa. This section of the book is quite satirical and very funny in places.

In the second part of the book, Massala-Massala is in Paris, but it is nothing like what he has imagined. He is living with a dozen or more other immigrants in what is apparently a single room on the top floor (no elevator) of an eight-story building (which may have been condemned), lit only by a skylight. Gradually, he meets some of the movers and shakers of the immigrant community, who clearly are making their living illegally and, once he has been provided with new false documentation (since tourist visas expire), Moki introduces him to one of the most important movers and shakers who will in turn introduce Massala-Massala, now known as Marcel Bonaventure because that's the name on his papers, into the world of the black market. In this section, Mabanckou paints a picture of African immigrant life in Paris, and Massala-Massala meditates on how he has not lived up to his father's guidance.

I enjoyed this book, and I felt it presented a damning look at postcolonial attraction to the culture and life of the former colonizer but, having read later works by Mabanckou, I think he's become an even more interesting writer as he's written more.

As a side note, I was interested that Mabanckou's epigraph for one of the sections was a quote from a poem by Abdellatif Laâbi, some of whose work I've also recently read.

80. Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French

I read this book because of a recommendation here on LT that assured me that a lot of it was about prewar, pre-revolution China and not just about the gruesome murder of a 19-year-old English schoolgirl. And so it was, and French is a good writer, and I was eager to find out what happened, or what the young woman's father figured out after the police failed at their investigation. And it was a mildly interesting read.

But I guess I felt French was saying, in so many ways, "look at the corruption, look at the vice, ooh, so exotic" and telling the story from the perspective of the English (and to a lesser extent, other Europeans, especially the White Russian refugees from the Soviet Union). You'd almost think the Chinese were only there to complement the Europeans.

There's a district where drinking and drug selling and prostitution go on. How shocking! The local police are corrupt. How terrible! Sometimes the Europeans and Chinese mix. How daring! Many people won't talk to the cops. How surprising! The English want to investigate but have their hands tied by their higher-ups. How unusual! Well, you get the idea. The book relies a lot on the unfamiliarity of most readers with this time and place, and on their being interested in the "exotic" nature of it. But I did read the whole thing.

And PS, the subtitle "How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China" -- I don't think so!

81. Garnethill by Denise Mina

I had mixed feelings about the first book by Denise Mina I read earlier this month, but I'm glad I didn't give up on her and read this book, her first, and the one that first got the person who recommended Mina to me, RidgewayGirl, enthusiastic about her. I found the damaged personality of the protagonist, Maureen -- who the morning after a night of heavy drinking finds her lover brutally murdered in her living room -- compelling. I enjoyed getting to know many of the other characters, including Maureen's family (mostly bad) and friends (mostly good), as well as a variety of police officers, and I appreciated the way Mina wove in the issues the characters are facing, including sexual abuse, psychiatric and other problems, crime, class, and poverty. There was humor too, and even thought the plot may have bordered on the melodramatic, I will now look for other books by Mina.

Garnethill is the first in a trilogy which takes the main characters to an interesting resolution. Mina has started another series as well.

I have Garnethill from the library but my stack is way too big right now! (Oh like everyone's isn't!)

Thanks, ffortsa. Ridgeway Girl recommended Mina to me, and I first read the first novel in the new series, with Detective Alex Morrow, because that was what she was reading. As I said in my review, I had mixed feelings about it, but I wanted to give Mina another chance, with the book that got RG interested in her, and I liked this one much better, better enough that I bought the next book in the trilogy yesterday. I won't get to it for a while though, probably, because I want to read some other books first.

I added Garnet Hill to my wish list. Wouldn't you know it--the next two volumes are on Kindle, but not this, the first volume. I've encountered this before, and I wonder why they do that. I'll just have to wait until the next time I'm in a bookstore instead of one-clicking.

82. Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník

About two thirds of the way through this fun but mystifying book, Ouředník writes:

"Reader! does our story seem rambling? Do you have the feeling that the plot is at a standstill? That, generally speaking, nothing much is going on in the book you now hold in your hands? Do not despair: Either the author's a fool or you are; the odds are even. Others have died and so shall we, we'll die, oy vey, alack, alas! Who on earth knows how on earth it will turn out? Sometimes a person gets tangled up in his own life without realizing it; and the same is true of characters in novels.

You ask: how will it all end? But that, dear readers, we cannot reveal. We began this story with no clear aim or preconceived idea. How it will turn out, we do not know; whether it will turn out, we haven't a clue. . . . ." p. 90

So what is this book about? On the surface, it is the story of an elderly man who once wrote a book and who lives in what appears to be an apartment building for retired people, a building in which there was a fire that might have been arson, his son who may be somewhat retarded, a cabin they might have owned in the mountains where a crime might have been committed decades ago, and a police detective who is apparently lackadaisically investigating. Chess is somehow involved too, and sex, and some pointed remarks about the Czech and Czech writers.

I read this book almost a week ago, but haven't had time to review it until now, and it's been puzzling me all this time. It seems to be, in some way, about life and death, and I think it tries to mirror the randomness and sometimes meaninglessness of life, and I also think it may be about memory, and how we remember what happened in earlier stages of our life. But really, as Ouředník says above, I haven't a clue.

I did enjoy it, although perhaps not as much as Ouředník's The Opportune Moment, 1855, which I really liked when I read it earlier this year and which inspired me to get this book too. Parts of it are very funny, and Ouředník (and his translator) really have a way with words, as the excerpt I quoted above shows. I really wonder how the translator went about translating all the wordplay; it read very well in English but I do wonder in cases like a line which reads "he couldn't have gotten laid if he'd been an egg," which is very funny in English, but could Czech possibly have the same expression or is this the translator taking a different joke in Czech and finding an English equivalent? I'm not complaining about this because all the wordplay was a lot of fun and so I was impressed by the translation, but I'm just interested in how translation works.

That is an excellent question about the translation and I wish someone would answer it!

Love your review of Onitsha and I'll have to add it to my list as I enjoyed Wandering Star. I've also had Mina recommended to me so good to hear that you're finding them worth reading. Have you read Ian Rankin?

Subtitles.... Don't get me started. I loved the title of my book (eventually) but the subtitle was sooooo over the top that it continues to make me crazy. They are all designed to sell books. That said, I did like that book about "old China" although I completely agree re exoticism and orientalism. But it was an intriguing story that I simply had never heard before, and a fascinating time in China's history.

Also laughing at the tow/toe; trouper/trooper. If I had a dollar for every one of those... My bete noire right now is rein in/reign in. Seriously folks, the latter simply doesn't make sense. Just stop and think...

I've obtained a UK copy of Simon Sebag Montefiore's new novel, set in Soviet Russia -- will let you know how it goes. Did you read Sashenka?

oh now, how many people do you think stop and thing about - shall we say - spelling? Or the roots of words? Or what they really mean? Everything is sound now.

161 Me too, Merrikay!

162 Thanks, Kerry. It was The Prospector that got me started reading Le Clezio; I haven't read Wandering Star yet. And no, I haven't read Ian Rankin. I used to read a lot of mysteries and haven't been in the habit lately, until I got hooked on Camilleri last year, and I'm trying to restrict myself because series can be so addictive.

163 I agree, Suzanne, about it being an unfamiliar time/place. And, ooh, rein/reign, have to agree! I didn't know Montefiore had written novels too; will have to look for those. By the way, my PLF arrived from the UK, and I hope to start it this weekend.

164 Judy, that's just too depressing!

#164 Which is one reason why I'm so glad that my daughter's fifth grade curriculum includes Greek and Latin roots. Hopefully it will counteract some of the texting talk.

The process of translation and the skills of the translator are extremely fascinating and you hit upon a very good point. Sometimes is it really the voice of the author we are hearing or his flawed spokesperson or his improving tone?

Czech humour is, I'm told, very earthy. I do doubt whether a literal translation with the hen would have produced the joke as it was translated.

Have a great Sunday.

and translating poetry? Sheesh? That's a lot of what Margaret Randall did, translating from Spanish to English. I can't even imagine. It makes my head hurt.

83. La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas

Plots and counterplots. Betrayal and friendship. Poisonings and swordplay. Romance and treachery. Swashbuckling knights and beautiful women. Treachery and loyalty. What's not to like?

I certainly enjoyed this tale, set in Paris in 1572. The wedding of Henry, King of Navarre, a Huguenot (Protestant) and Margot, the sister of the Catholic French King Charles, is set to take place among much celebration -- and among a plan to massacre the Huguenots assembled for the wedding. Thus begins a roller coaster ride of plots and love affairs, religious and political intrigue, vicious hatred and stalwart honor, all loosely based on history. Suffice it to say Dumas keeps the plot rolling along, but he also creates many memorable characters especially Margot herself, her murderous and power-hungry mother, Catherine of Medici, and her mother's "perfumer" (i.e., poisoner). It is interesting that these two women are so strong and important in an early 19th century novel.

The notes in my Oxford World Classics edition were very helpful, as was the introduction, which pointed out that the early nineteenth century saw a popular hunger for action-oriented, melodramatic works, and for novels that dealt with France's history. The notes also indicates where Dumas strayed from the historical record.

While I found this book hard to put down, I think a little goes a long way, at least for me. I do plan to read more Dumas, including The Count of Monte Cristo, but probably not until next summer since it is such a tome and because I think I need a rest between Dumas novels.

84. Exile by Denise Mina

I was able to finish this novel, the second in Mina's Garnethill trilogy, rapidly because I was stuck at the car shop yesterday and couldn't concentrate on my other books because of the blaring TV. This book continues the story of Maureen O'Donnell from the first volume, and I was especially glad not just to see her again but also to read more about her family and friends, as Mina is so good at creating characters as well as setting the backdrop of economically troubled Glasgow and dealing with issues of mental illness, sexual abuse, and alcoholism in a matter-of-fact way. In this novel, Maureen becomes involved in trying to find out who murdered an alcoholic former resident of a women's shelter where her friend Leslie works, and in doing so encounters a variety of scary and dangerous people both in Glasgow and in London. I am looking forward to the third volume of the trilogy because I find the characters, flawed as they are, so appealing.

I read the Dumas swashbucklers when I was about 14. I think it was the perfect age for them. But I do remember loving the Count of Monte Cristo.

85. Oil on Water by Helon Habila

Part adventure story, part an exploration of environmental and political activism and violence, this is at heart a tale of the devastation -- environmental, cultural, and personal -- wrought by the Nigerian oil industry and its inherent colonialism even in a post-colonial era. I became interested in reading this novel by a Nigerian writer (who lives and teaches in the US) after reading 419 by a Canadian author.

The strength of this book is its portrait of the Niger River delta: the intricate and confusing network of waterways, fouled by oil, and the dead fish floating in the; the abandoned villages and those destroyed by the war between the military and the militants who challenge the oil companies' control of the area; the destruction of the river-based culture and economy' the histories of some of the people who live in the delta; and, always, the flares from the oil wells, flickering everywhere. I was also impressed by the way Habila interweaves the past and the present of the story line, so the reader learns the history of the characters and how they got to be where they are in way that loops back and forth, occasionally confusingly, in time.

That said, there were aspects of the book that grated on me. The narrator, Rufus, is a young journalist, sent originally as part of a small group of journalist who volunteered to meet the militants who had kidnapped the wife of a British oil company engineer to verify that she is indeed still alive and eager to be returned once the ransom is paid. As the novel progresses, Rufus and his idol Zaq, formerly the most famous journalist in Nigeria and now an alcoholic and ill has-been, venture deeper into the delta in search not only of the British woman and the "Professor," a leader of the militants, but also of the story and the deeper "meaning" of the story. Although complications ensue, this allows Habila, a former journalist himself, to let Rufus interview all sorts of people, thereby providing their life histories to the reader. This seemed a little forced and convenient to me, although I found their stories interesting. I also found some twists of the plot a little convenient and not entirely believable.

Much in this book turns out to be not as it first appear; as Rufus says in the very first words of the book:

"I am walking down a well-lit path, with incidents neatly labeled and dated, but when I reach halfway memory lets go of my hand, and a fog rises and covers the faces and places, and I am left clawing about in the dark, lost, and I have to make up the obscured moments as I go along, make up the faces and places, even the emotions. Sometimes, to keep on course, I have to return to more recognizable landmarks, and then, with the safety net under me, I can leap onto less certain terrain.

. . .

The fog lifts as suddenly as it descended, and the sun shines brightly again, and once more I am on sure ground, but I know the fog can return again, get into memory's eyes, blinding it momentarily."

86. The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor

For the many years since I was first entranced by Patrick Leigh Fermor's tale of his travels, on foot, starting at the age of 18, from Holland to Czechoslovakia in A Time of Gifts and then from Hungary to the Rumanian and Bulgarian border in Between the Woods and the Water, I , like his countless other admirers, have yearned for the third volume which would take him to his destination of Constantinople. And here, after his death, it is -- sort of. Leigh Fermor's literary executors, dear friends, took his early drafts of the material, enhanced by some of his own editing in his waning years, and turned into this still incomplete volume which ends in mid-sentence several days before he reached his goal. As his friends and editors note in their introduction:

". . . on his death in 2011 he left behind a manuscript of the final narrative whose shortcomings or elusiveness had tormented him for so many years. He never completed it as he would have wished. The reasons for this are uncertain. . . . The Broken Road may not precisely be the 'third volume" that so torment him, but it contains, at least, the shape and scent of the promised book, and here his journey must rest. pp. xii and xxi.

It is, of course, delightful to be on the road again with the youthful Patrick Leigh Fermor, with his fascination with and erudition about everything from natural history to the ancient movements of peoples, the individual people he meets (from aristocrats and diplomats to beekeepers, woodburners, fishermen, shepherds, and monks), art and architecture, wine and food, religion, charming girls and women, and drinking and conversation. His perceptions are not as finely tuned, as energetically shaped and edited, as in the earlier volumes, and the reader gains more insight into his memory and writing processes, personal commentary that perhaps was ruthlessly excised as those volumes were extensively written and rewriiten.

Nonetheless, there is much that is splendid in this book: the shock of the glittering nightlife of Bucharest after months in small villages, mountains, and plains; the dog that followed him and bayed at the moon; astounding dances in a cave filled with goats on the edge of the Black Sea; the wildness and solitude of much of the country he walks through. And over this, our knowledge that this was a world about to be torn apart forever by war, by nazism and then communism and then modernity, a world that is no more.

At the end, the editors have appended a section from Leigh Fermor's diary that covers three weeks he spent, just after reaching Constantinople, walking through the breathtakingly beautiful and astoundingly rugged peninsula of Mount Athos, where he stayed at the diverse monasteries that perch on the rocky outcrops. Written in great detail (although apparently edited multiple times), this section has an immediacy and a voice that contrasts with the longer journey that precedes it.

I am glad Patrick Leigh Fermor's literary executors produced this volume. It doesn't stand up to the two earlier ones but, as a devotee, I am grateful for their efforts.

Nice reviews, Rebecca. I am putting Oil on Water onto my list.

Thanks, Rhonda!

Glad you found something to like/appreciate in the Habila novel; I do want to read more by him next year. I haven't delved into PLF yet; have been saving it for myself as a treat/reward. I have been working my way through a stack of ARCs and also must read A clockwork Orange for my RL book circle next week. I figured that # 3 wouldn't live up to the others, just because he clearly was having so much difficulty writing it. Still, even a subpar PLF is good news.

87. A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel by Mikhail Bulgakov

In this short semi-autobiographical novel, Bulgakov satirizes the famous Moscow Art Theater and his experiences transforming his novel The White Guard (about an upper class family from Kiev during the civil war, from a very White perspective) into a play, The Days of the Turbins, that could be acceptable to the censors (indeed, even Stalin became a fan of the play). The conceit of the novel is that the novelist turned playwright Maksudov, before he threw himself off the Tesepnoi Bridge, sent these memoirs to the writer, hence "a dead man's memoir"; it has also been translated under the title Black Snow, which is the title of Maksudov's play in the novel.

The novel is clearly extremely witty, although I had to rely on the notes to see who all the characters are really based on, and I'm sure this would have been much more fun for readers familiar with the cast of characters of the 1930s Moscow theater scene. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it, and even laughed aloud at certain points. Even without having a grasp of who the "real" people were (although one of the co-directors of the Theater is Stanislavsky, famous for developing "method" acting), I appreciated the insight into the craziness of the theater: the dislike of the two founders for each other (and the absence of one of them, although he sends telegrams with advice), the difficulty of staging new works featuring younger characters with the aging actors instead of always performing classics, the peculiarities of individual actors, the censor's desire to completely change the characters and the plot of the play, the amazing abilities of the typist/office manager, the jealousy of other writers, although one gives him sage advice about dealing with the censor (who, by the way, is called the Head of Internal Order).

" 'What you ought to have done is not argue,' Bombardov said quietly, 'and reply like this: 'I am very grateful to you for your guidance, Ivan Vasilievich, I will definitely put it into effect.' You must not object, do you understand that or not? At Sivstev Vrazhek Lane nobody objects."

'How is that possible? Nobody ever objects?'

'Nobody, not ever,' Bombardov replied, tapping out each word. 'Nobody every has, nobody does, and nobody ever will.'" p. 113

The book gathers speed as it goes on, and it is occasionally difficult to remember all the characters, so the total effect is of barely contained chaos and the insanity (and worse) of the theater world and the effects of the Soviet system on it. This book doesn't stand up to The Master and Margarita or The White Guard but it is full of entertaining yet horrifying scenes of the creative life, such as it was, of 1920s and 30s Moscow.

#176 Thanks, Suzanne. I would read more by Habila too. And, exactly what you say about the PLF: "subpar" is still a treat. I'm sure you'll enjoy it when you get to it.

88. Resolution by Denise Mina

In the conclusion of Mina's Garnethill trilogy, Maureen is forced to confront several of her demons at the same time. The trial of the man who gruesomely killed her lover in her apartment is about to start and she has to testify at it, the father who abused her as a child is back in town, and her sister is about to have a baby, frightening her about what her father might do to the baby. Then, because of a good deed she does for a strange old woman who also works in the down-at-the-heels market where Maureen and her friend Leslie are selling illegal cigarettes, she uncovers what is really going on at a brothel. Fortunately for Maureen, because a lot of creepy things are happening, her friendship with Leslie has been repaired, she has her new friend Kilty, and her brother Liam still is her only connection to her family, although her newly sober mother keeps calling her.

As with the earlier novels in this trilogy, the strengths of this one are the characters, the portrayal of the underside of Glasgow, and the pacing. The plot was interesting enough to keep me reading although, especially at the end, some of it strained my credulity, including the impact of various plot developments on Maureen. But I will read more Mina.

89. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Although I'm a big fan of Vargas Llosa, and although this book has been on my shelves for 30 years (I still wrote my name and the date in books back in June 1983), I never read it until now. And what a delightful book it is! Vargas Llosa intersperses semi-autobiographical chapters about the 18-year-old narrator's life and his budding romance with his 32-year-old divorced aunt by marriage with chapters that the reader eventually realizes are episodes in the radio serials written by a Bolivian scriptwriter recently hired by the radio station at which the narrator works.

In the Aunt Julia chapters, the narrator, whose name is Mario but is generally called Marito or Varguesita, wants above all to be a writer; nonetheless, he is somewhat lackadaisically going to law school to please his family, while working as news editor and writer at the radio station and hanging out with his friends. He lives in Lima with his grandparents, as his parents are in the US, and spends a great deal of time with members of his large extended family. And that is how he meets Julia, who has come from Bolivia to Lima to visit her sister, the wife of one of the narrator's uncles, to recover from her divorce and find a new husband. One of the delights of these sections are the narrator's sense of fun, as well as romance and responsibility, and some parts are almost laugh-out-loud funny, especially as this part of the plot builds to its conclusion. I also enjoyed the descriptions of how the radio serials are recorded, and the efforts of the sound effects man in particular. The characters Vargas Llosa creates are wonderful.

The chapters representing the work by the master, and eccentric, Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, are more puzzling. They start off as fairly standard soap opera fare -- romance with a whiff of incest, rape, etc. -- and gradually become weirder and weirder and darker and darker. At one point I was confused because a name seemed to be changed, and gradually (from the narrator's chapters), I learned that the radio listeners were confused by this too, as characters seem to be moving from one serial to another, changing lives, professions, and more, and dying in one serial to be resurrected in another. Through this, the reader sees Pedro Camacho's breakdown before the listeners and the radio station owners start discussing it.

Although both the narrator chapters and the serial chapters move along at a brisk pace, with well drawn characters and well developed plots, there is another aspect to this book, and that is the nature of writing. The narrator frequently discusses stories he is trying to write, and of course is fascinated by how Camacho works, so part of the story is the portrait of the aspiring writer as a young man. And this is probably semi-autobiographical as well. The last chapter, which I felt a little tacked on, reveals what happens when the older author, who has been living in Europe, visits Peru and runs into some of his old friends, some who have risen higher in the world, and some who have fallen. It ties up some loose ends, but I felt the novel could have ended before this.

All in all, this book was a lot of fun.

90. The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina

The first book by Denise Mina I read was the first volume of this Detective Alex Morrow series and I was intrigued enough to start her Garnethill trilogy even though the Alex Morrow book, Still Midnight, didn't wow me. I'm glad I did, because I loved that trilogy, and I liked this second Alex Morrow a lot better than the first. Maybe it's because I now like Mina's writing so much, but I found the story a lot more interesting, dealing not as much with the brutal murder of a young woman as with the damaged lives of several of the characters and the impact of parental neglect. As always with Mina, it is the characters and the setting that stand out, not just Alex and her colleagues and family but also the young murderers and their families. (This is not a spoiler because it happens in the first few pages.)

91. The African by J.-M. G. Le Clézio

In this brief, haunting, perceptive, and needless to say beautifully written memoir, Le Clézio searches for a way to understand his father's life, and the sharp dividing line World War II created in it. Like the young boy in Onitsha, Le Clézio was born in France at the beginning of the war, while his father was in Africa, and didn't meet him until years later when he, with his mother and slightly older brother (not a character in the novel), rejoined his father in Africa. Unlike the father in the novel, Le Clézio's was French (although born in Mauritius, which at the time was a British colony but had originally been a French one; when he was a boy, the family was evicted from their house and had leave Mauritius) and a doctor.

In the first two chapters, Le Clézio describes his own introduction to Africa as an 8-year-old, and it was interesting to read about experiences that were then included, in a transmuted way, in Onitsha.

"So the days in Ogoja had become my treasure, the luminous past that I could not lose. I recalled the blaze of light on the red earth, the sun that cracked the roads, the barefoot race through the savannah all the way to the termite fortresses, the thunderstorms rising in the evening, the nights filled with sounds, with cries, our female cat making love with the tigrillos on the sheet metal roof, the torpor that set in after fever, the cold coming in under the mosquito nets at dawn. All that heat, that burning, that tingling." p. 16

But most of the book is about his father. Offended by the class-conscious rigidity of the British medical establishment, after receiving his medical degree in England he went first to what was then British Guiana and then in 1928 to Africa, to remote regions in Cameroon and Nigeria where he was the only white man and where he was far from colonial outposts and attitudes. Later, after he married Le Clézio's mother, she joined him there, and they would travel by foot and on horseback for days at time. The descriptions of the country and the people are beautiful and fascinating. It was a world as little touched by colonialism as life in a colonized country could be, so Le Clézio's parents experienced the people and their culture as they had more or less always lived. Hating colonialism, they were open to the world they found themselves in.

What Le Clézio explores is how the man who could be so engaged with this "treasure of humanity" could turn into the rigid disciplinarian that Le Clézio experienced when he came to Africa and met his father for the first time. He attributes this first of all to the war. Le Clézio's mother returned to France to give birth to her children and they were stranded there by the war; although his father made a superhuman effort to get to France and bring them back to safety in Africa, he was unable to reach them or communicate with hem and must have lived in an agony of worry. Le Clézio also looks at the position his father was assigned to after the war, closer to colonial centers, not in the remote, freer regions. "Then my father discovered -- after all those years of feeling close to the Africans, like a relative, a friend -- that the doctor was just another instrument of colonial power, no different from the policeman, the judge, or the soldier." And he looks at what it meant, both for him and his father, not to have had those eight years together.

"Things would undoubtedly have been different if there hadn't been the fracture caused by the war, if my father, instead of being faced with children who had become strangers to him, had learned to live in the same house with a baby, if he had been part of the slow process that leads from childhood to the age of reason. That African land in which he had known the happiness of sharing his adventurous life with a woman, in Banso, in Bamenda, was the very same land that had robbed him of a family life and the love of his children." p. 92

Finally, Le Clézio looks briefly at some postcolonial struggles, including the horrors of the Biafran war, which took place in areas he was familiar with, and then examines how his own experiences in Africa as a young boy formed his personality and interests.

"I am forever yearning to go back to Africa, to my childhood memory. To the source of my feelings, to that which molded my character. The world changes, it's true, and the boy who is standing over there on the plain amidst the tall grasses in the hot breath of wind bearing the odors of the savannah, the shrill sound of the forest, the boy feeling the dampness of the sky and the clouds upon his lips, that boy is so far from me that no story, no journey will ever make it possible for me to reach him again. p. 102

This book is enhanced by wonderful old photographs taken by Le Clézio's parents and is printed on much heavier paper than is common these days; it is a lovely example of thoughtful printing. And so I was shocked and disappointed at one error that leaped out at me, when the publisher failed to notice that at one point the text reads "Port Harbor" when it means "Port Harcourt."

Wonderful reviews as always, Rebecca.
Note to self:
- Read more Vargas Llosa (I read The Storyteller many moons ago and didn't love it).
-Dust off Oil on Water
- Give Denise Mina a go

Have a lovely weekend.

btw I still occasionally write my name in the books I buy, schoolboyish or not.

Thanks for stopping by, Paul, and I hope you're having a nice weekend too.

92. A House in the Country by José Donoso

This is a remarkable book, and I hardly know where to begin to talk about it. Starting as a seemingly straightforward tale of the hugely rich and aristocratic Ventura family, consisting of seven sisters and brothers, their spouses, and their 33 surviving children, it quickly becomes convoluted, bizarre, disturbing, comic, perverse, shocking, postmodern, and puzzling. At the same time, Donoso has said that this book was his response to the 1973 coup by Pinochet and that he has even included word-for-word excerpts from both Pinochet and Allende (in this interview on the Dalkey Archive website).

The story begins at the Ventura's house in the country, Marulanda, where the parents are preparing to take their huge retinue of servants and go for a day-long excursion to a fabulous woodland glade and waterfall, leaving the cousins, ranging in age from 6 to 16, locked inside the "park" that surrounds the the house and separates it from the grassy plains and native populations outside with hundreds of metal lances tipped with gold and embedded in cement beneath the ground. The servants are not just servants but, led by the huge Majordomo, enforcers of the parents' rule over the children, doling out cruel punishments that leave no marks. And the native people have been conquered by the Venturas' ancestors and now work for them, mining and laminating the gold that is the source of the their wealth. The white people all believe the natives are cannibals, and threaten the children that they will be eaten if they misbehave.

So the stage is set for intrigue and trouble when all the adults leave: all the adults but one. For Uncle Adriano, who married the totally frivolous and somewhat slow-witted Balbina Ventura, and who is the father of 9-year-old Wenceslao, has been enclosed in a straitjacket, drugged, and locked in a tower ever since he "went crazy" because of a truly horrifying and shocking event. (A doctor, he was the only family member to have any relationship with the native people.) Wenceslao is determined to take advantage of the absence of the adults, which it develops has been engineered by a group of the children, to free his father. Other groups of children are engaged in plots of their own, and most of them believe the adults will not return at the end of the day as they have promised. Some of them try to leave.

That's about all I can tell to set the stage, both because I don't want to spoil all the surprises and because there is so much else going on in this novel, or "fable," as the author, who intervenes occasionally to explain what he is doing with the plot and the characters, persists in describing the work. Towards the end, he also notes that the characters are "emblems" and "a-psychological." I am sure I didn't understand everything Donoso was doing in this book, but here are some thoughts.

First of all, there is an artificial feel to a lot of the book. Not only are the characters "emblems" (although Donoso has accomplished quite a feat in making so many characters understandably different, it is extremely helpful that he includes a list of parents, children, and ages at the beginning), but several of them engage in a long-running improvised "play" called La Marquise Est Sortie à Cinq Heures. The "play" allow them to use flowery language, flirt and plot, and remove themselves from the reality of life in the summer house. Further, the house is filled with trompe l'oeil frescoes and wall decorations; the highly liveried servants melt into the walls, and the people on the walls spring to life. There are also revelations about the library and other aspects of the house that are not what they appear to be. Tying in with this, there are people who are blind, or practically blind, or dependent on very strong eyeglasses, and there is a whole network of tunnels beneath the house (for reasons revealed later) in which people have to find their way by feeling the edges.

Then, there is the whole idea of cannibalism. Whether the native people ever were cannibals is never quite clear, but the idea that they "still" are serves the function of keeping the children in place. At the same time, the mothers are always saying things to the little children like "oh, you're so delicious" and "oh, I could just eat you up with kisses." The idea of cannibalism threads its way through the novel.

There is also a theme of holding back nature. The lance "walls" of the park hold back the grasses of the plain, but every year in the fall there are winds that bring what are called "thistledown blizzards" that make it almost impossible to breathe. And many of the tunnels under the house are brimming with the unstoppable growth of wild mushrooms.

The second half of the novel relates to the return of the adults, after what seems to them only a day. Denying the reality that appears before they even reach the house, they dispatch the servants to return to the house and straighten everything out while they return to their homes in the capital until order is restored. This section gets really wild and crazy, with turmoil, fighting, cruelty, bravery, and revelation after revelation; at this point, "reality" becomes even more tenuous than it has already been, and the author returns more often to discuss his choices.

So what to make of this book? I was really impressed by Donoso's ideas and imagination. I was less able to detect the political ideas; although it was possible to see the servants, on their return, as the army, it was a lot less clear who other groups of people might represent. My conclusion is that this is, as Donoso, said, a "response" to the Pinochet coup and crackdown and that he is not trying to make complete analogies. I think I spent too much time trying to figure out who might stand for whom and not enough just experiencing the novel.

Although I've written at length, I've only scratched the surface of this complicated book. If I didn't have so many other books I want to read, I would start it all over again.

PS As a side note, this is another book I've had since the mid-80s. I see that my edition was published as part of something called The Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature, and the list of other titles at the front of my book is very intriguing, including authors and books I would like to look out for.

Nice review!

Wow, you make this sound like an irresistible read.

93. Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

This fun novella is both a mystery story and a gentle parody of a mystery story, with poisons, atmospheric events, people who aren't who they seem to me, a dead bird, literary allusions, and lots of subtle humor. It begins as a somewhat pompous and self-satisfied doctor travels to a remote Argentine beach resort, owned by his cousin who, he points out, owes him money so he gets to stay without charge. He encounters a group of other visitors, one of whom is poisoned to death that very night. Soon, everyone is a suspect for one reason or another; a vicious storm that blows sand everywhere starts up; and more mysterious things begin to happen.

Although I enjoyed the mystery, I was more delighted by the writing style of Bioy Casares and Ocampo, and especially liked it when one of the amateur detectives/suspects revealed that his favorite novel was The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo, which I read earlier this year. This was a quick read, and a fun one.

Note: There is a problem with this book that LT staff are trying to solve, in that my copy doesn't link up with the other copies of the book and the Bioy Casares author page doesn't show that I own it. So, above, I have provided an HTML link to the page that shows my copy of the book; if you do a regular touchstone, it goes to a German edition of the book, which is the only one the Bioy Casares author page shows, not all the others. It also isn't letting me save my review on the book page.

Thanks, Rhonda and Kerry! Just be aware that there are some gruesome parts!

Well I located a copy of Garnet Hill at Half-Price Books, and raced through it. It's as good as you say. I've now also bought the Kindle versions of the two subsequent volumes in the series, and will read them soon.

I've added the Donoso to my wishlist. I have The Obscene Bird of Night on my shelf, but Daryl's review of it a few years ago made me hesitant to read it. A House in the Country sounds much more appealing.

As many of you know, I've been organizing the Reading Globally theme reads for the past few years. We're now at the stage of suggesting topics for next year, so if any of you are interested in Reading Globally, please come on over to this thread and post your ideas for next year. You can go to the Reading Globally group page to get an idea of what our themes have been this year and in years gone by.

94. Freud by Jonathan Lear

I bought this insightful and mostly fascinating book because of Dewald/dmsteyn's excellent review earlier this year and, rather than repeating a lot of what he said, I will mostly focus on my reactions to the book.

The author, Jonathan Lear, is both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst (nonpracticing, I believe), and he approaches Freud's key ideas primarily from a philosophical perspective. Neither an apologist for Freud nor a dismisser of him, he is not afraid to criticize Freud for ideas that haven't held up or weren't well thought out in the first place, but he also isn't afraid to applaud him for his innovative and creative theories. As he notes:

"It is worth reminding ourselves that the central concepts of psychoanalysis emerge as a response to human suffering. Freud listened to ordinary people who came to him in pain, and his ideas emerged from what he heard. Some of his ideas are speculative extravagances and deserve to be discarded, but the central concepts of psychoanalysis are closely tied to clinical reality. One aim of this book is to bring the reader back to clinical moments and show how theoretical ideas develop out of them. . . .

Just as a doctor probes for the hidden causes of physical diseases, so Freud took himself to be probing the unconscious for hidden meanings making the patient ill. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that a certain clinical brutality flows from this self-understanding. . . . It also blinds him to the profound philosophical and ethical significance of his discoveries. Another aim of this book is to bring this significance to light." pp. 9-10

In successive chapters, Lear explores Freud's ideas on interpreting the unconscious, sexuality, interpreting dreams, transference, mental functioning, the structure of the psyche, and morality and religion. I found the first chapters the most compelling, the ones in which Lear discusses the ideas at the heart of psychoanalysis, and the later ones, in which Lear discusses and mostly criticizes Freud's broader theories, less interesting. It was fascinating to learn about how anxiety can prevent us from examining our true motivations, how many of our strategies for avoiding troubling ideas extend back into childhood, how astoundingly complex many of the associations from our dreams can be, how we can repeat behaviors without realizing we're repeating them, and much more. I also liked the way Lear describes some of the people Freud treated (always acknowledging that he relied on Freud's notes, not on knowing the people himself), focusing on how they presented themselves in the clinical setting.

I was also interested in the way Lear brings in philosophical concepts, including those of ethics and freedom, and the way he illustrates how philosophers such as Socrates thought of the psyche. I know a little more about psychiatry than I do about philosophy (about which I know almost nothing) and I found Lear's philosophical discussions fascinating.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading this book for several weeks in the middle of it, and so some of the most interesting material isn't fresh in my mind. But for the most part I found it well-written, intriguing, compassionate, and perceptive.

As Lear notes in his conclusion:

"The aim of psychoanalysis is not to promote homogenization of the soul but to establish active communication between what hitherto had been disparate and warring parts. These lines of communication serve a bridging function -- uniting the psyche by bringing its different voices into an common conversation. Conflicts will still arise. It is a condition of life itself that the psyche will never be a conflict-free zone. But when they do arise, they will be experienced as conflicts -- rather than in some disguise. . . . .

Plato, who did so much to bring philosophy to life, was ever wary of the myriad ways it could go dead. . . . Philosophy, he said, was not so much a matter of acquiring beliefs as of turning the soul away from fantasy and towards reality. It seems to me that Freud -- whatever mistakes he made, whatever warts he showed -- made a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of what soul-turning might be." pp. 222-223

Fascinating review

I like the idea of soul-turning.

95. The Hare by César Aira

Aira is known for his novellas -- I've read one and have others on my shelves -- so this book, at 266 pages, is a tome for him. Although I hesitate to generalize from the one other Aira I've read, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, I think the shorter length works better for him, as there were definitely sections that dragged a little. And this book was more dependent on plot which, again probably unfairly generalizing, is not necessarily his strong point. Also, I found his depiction of the Indians a little grating, although I realize that they were partly described through the lens of the late 19th century protagonist and partly symbolic in a philosophical way. Nonetheless, Aira shines in his sly humor, his absurdity, his stunning descriptions of nature, his imagination, his light-hearted philosophical digressions, and his love of language.

The story begins with a somewhat extraneous look at the activities of the Restorer of the Laws, i.e., the dictator, of Argentina. He then gives his blessing, and his best horse, to the English naturalist, Clarke, who is mounting an expedition to the pamaps to look for the extremely rare, and perhaps nonexistent, Legibrereian hare (which, it turns out, may not even be living creature). The rest of the novel covers Clarke's travels through the pampas with Carlos, a 15-year-old would-be artist, and Gauna, a taciturn guide who, it develops, is on a quest of his own. In the course of their travels, they encounter three very different groups of Mapuche Indians, get to know several individuals in each group, get caught up in various plots and "wars" (without generally understanding what they're about), reveal aspects of their pasts (including that both Clarke and Carlos were adopted), and ultimately experience several plot revelations, at least one of which was obvious to me about halfway through the book.

But this is only the plot, and the plot is the least important part of the book. As mentioned, Aira loves philosophical digressions, and some of the ideas he explores in this book are simultaneity, identity and twinhood, transformation, continuity and time, and myth and reality. In a way, the book is all about story-telling: the myths groups live by, how these myths differ from "scientific" and "rational" explanations, the imaginary world versus the real world, the stories we tell others about ourselves and the stories other tell us, and, of course, the story that is this novel. (I do think Aira is playing with the reader at times, especially in the way he somewhat ridiculously ties up a lot of loose ends in the final chapter.) Thinking about a story Gauna told him about why he wanted to come to the pamaps, Clarke muses:

"He had to admit it was a very solid and plausible story, but that was entirely due to the fact that it included all (or nearly all) the details of what had happened in reality; by the same token, there must be other stories that did the same, even though they were completely different. Everything that happened, isolated and observed by an interpretive judgment, or even simply by the imagination, became an element that could be combined with any number of others. Personal invention was responsible for creating the overall structure, for seeing to it that these elements formed unities." p.170

As in the previous novel I read by Aira, there is a lot that is absurd in this book, and it can't be read in a literal way. If it weren't so much fun to read him, and if he weren't such a good writer, I might find this irritating. I think this book was a little bloated, but I enjoyed it, and I will read more Aira.

96. Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina

This is the third novel featuring Detective Alex Morrow, and in it she has both given birth to twins and informed her superiors about her half-brother Danny, one of the leaders of crime in Glasgow, so she is more relaxed in some ways than in the first two. Of course, she is still dedicated to solving the crime, in this case the murder of a grandfather during a postal robbery, a grandfather who both seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and to have some connection with the robber. As in any Denise Mina mystery, the novel is about a lot more than the crime. In this book, the focus is on how money corrupts: corrupts those who have it and those who want it and those who don't know they want it. It is an examination of a broad web of police corruption and of criminals who put police officers in compromising positions so they can then ask favors of them. The sense of place is less strong in this novel than in other Minas I've read, but her characterization shines as always and the plot is more compelling than in some of her other works, although still dependent on a little surprise here and there.

Rebecca, I wanted to let you know that I've finally posted my review of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, which I first learned about from your thread. Thanks for all the great recommendations!

Thanks, Rosalita; I'm glad you liked it. I first heard about it here on LT from detailmuse, so I'm happy I could pass the recommendation along.

>197 rosalita: & 198 You just reminded me that I bought Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog after the reviews that you and detailmuse posted. I think that might be a fun one to read after I finish my current book.

97. The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce edited by Michael Newton

Although I'm not a big ghost story fan, when this book was on display at my favorite bookstore shortly before Halloween I snapped it up, and have been dipping into it ever since. A little to my surprise, I liked a large number of the stories, but perhaps this shouldn't have been surprising since the anthologist, Michael Newton, in his introduction, noted:

"In choosing the texts for this anthology, I worked on the principle that a story should be good in itself: that is, well written, sophisticated, and (if possible) frightening. This means that I felt it best not to shy away from some obvious choices. In my view, some very good anthologies of ghost stories are weakened by a desire to pick surprising, neglected or substandard stories by the best writers in the genre, or second rank stories by largely forgotten writers. . . . (This book is) for those who want one volume that brings together the very best examples of the genre."

I also appreciated the rest of Newton's introduction, in which he discussed the background of the ghost stories and some common themes and ideas. The stories in this book are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and are by British and US writers.

While I didn't like (or finish) all of them, there were quite a few stories that I found compelling, in particular Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story," Edward Bulwer Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters:, or The House and the Brain," Amelia B. Edwards' "The North Mail," Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea," Margaret Oliphant's "The Open Door," W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," Mary Wilkins Freeman's "The Wind in the Rose-Bush," and M. R. James' "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.'" Although very different, and in some cases a tad predictable, each of these fulfilled the anthologist's desire for well written and at least a little scary stories. I felt they gave me an overview of the genre, and some fun reading evenings, which is also what the anthologist intended.

Rebecca - Does wanting money for books count? Surely we get a pass for that one, right?

You've been busy!!

Re reading globally, I'm not sure I want to join another group and try to track what's going on (too much happening IRL, alas) but it struck me that thematic vs geographic categories might be intriguing. For instance: novels that wrestle with questions of national identity, or that involve populations that aren't actually part of any defined UN-accepted nation (eg the Kurds), or that deal with anti-colonial battles. Just a thought. Feel free to kidnap/annex it.

Thanks, Suz. We've done thematic categories in the past, and one is up for consideration this year (some aspect of World War I, fo rthe anniversary). I will add your thoughts to the mix when I post the voting thread later today.

And of course, even if you don't participate, you're welcome to swing by for inspiration, or a book or two!

98. Maíra by Darcy Ribeiro

This novel by a Brazilian anthropologist was a challenging read for me: at times fascinating and imaginative, at times frustrating and opaque. Ribeiro set himself the task of depicting fictionally the impact of western "civilization" on a remote tribe of Indians, the Mairun, deep in the forested regions of the Amazon. To do so, he mixes sections that tell of the Mairun origin myths and customs with stories told by people as varied as a Mairun who almost became a Roman Catholic priest, the Mairun guide of souls, other Mairuns, various missionaries, a half-Mairun river trader, an investigator, and others, and it was sometimes difficult to keep track of who was who.

The novel begins with the discovery of a dead white woman on the beach by the river, who has apparently died while giving birth to twins. Or was she murdered? By the end of the book, we have some idea of how she got there. She was a troubled young woman, Alma, who ended up on the same small plane as the Mairun man who had given up studying in Rome to be a priest and was returning home: Isías in his Western name, Avá in his Mairun name. As a Mairun, he is destined to become the next chieftain; the old one has just died (although apparently he didn't know this when he decided to leave Rome and return home). Alma ends up accompanying Isías/Avá by canoe down the river first to the monastery/convent where he originally studied as she had thought she would somehow help the nuns there, and then to his village. Needless to say, she is a curiosity there, but eventually she feels very at home; Isías/Avá has more difficulty fitting back in as he has become neither white nor Mairun.

This is the broadest outline of the plot, but the plot is just there to hang the ideas on. A lot of this book is about religion, both Mairun beliefs and Catholic and evangelical Protestant beliefs, and some of this, especially the Catholic material was hard for me to follow, especially since a lot of it was given in Latin and I didn't want to type it all in to Google Translate! The novel's sections are named largely with Christian concepts: Antiphony, Homily, Gospel, and Corpus. I feel I missed a lot of the Christian references and ideas.

On the other hand, the parts about the Mairun life and mythology were the richest and most compelling, and often beautifully written (and often quite earthy too), although occasionally I was very aware that an anthropologist was writing the book! (As far as I can tell, the Mairun are a made-up tribe, but I'm sure Ribeiro took ideas about customs, kinship, and origin myths from indigenous people he had studied.) I was quite taken with the guide of souls, the complex way the Mairun organize their intergroup relationships, and various individuals and their interactions.

Another aspect of the novel is how Isías/Avá attempts to reclaim his Mairun heritage but remains a prisoner in a way of all his years with the priests both in Brazil and in Rome. His struggle is a metaphor for one of the ways the indigenous cultures were destroyed; more overt methods make an appearance later on in the book.

This is a complex and complicated novel, and I don't feel it entirely works. But I am glad I read it, and I'm still thinking about it.

As a side note, I bought this book because I became interested in Aventura: The Vintage Library of Contemporary World literature, after reading Donoso's A House in the Country earlier this month (see this post in my Club Read thread); I had never heard of it before. These books are beautifully designed and printed on very nice paper, but this book at least was marred by careless proofreading (e.g., "wit" for "with").

Great review. I bet I would enjoy that. Anthro is my favorite subject and I think the place where I learned the most about human nature.

99. Backlands: The Canudos Campaign by Euclides da Cunha

I've wanted to read this book ever since I read The War at the End of the World because Vargas Llosa took the story told here, of the war between the followers of a charismatic religious leader in the backlands of northern Brazil and the army of the relatively young Brazilian republic, as the starting point of his novel. Da Cunha, a journalist who had been in the army himself, was what we now would call "embedded" with the army at the very end of the multi-campaign war; the rest of this lengthy and at times overblown book is the result of his detailed research although, in the fashion of the time (?), none of his sources are credited or footnoted.

For the book is not just about the war; nearly half of it paints a portrait of the backlands, or sertão, from a variety of perspectives: geological, meteorological, botanical, and human. And it is when da Cunha gets into the human makeup of the backlands that he gets into trouble with a modern reader, for da Cunha's "scientific" racism is vile. He ranks the races "evolutionarily" (guess which one is most evolved!) and describes in detail the various mixtures of black, white, and Indian blood, each of which has its own name. I suppose in some ways this "scientific" perspective was a step up from thinking of people of color as animals, and certainly it has to be taken in the context of the time, but it's pretty hard to read. Da Cunha also dabbles in psychology.

On the other hand, the geology and natural history of the region were fascinating: the backlands are incredibly rugged, remote, desolate, and alternately mountainous and desert-like. I did feel that his geological writing cried out for maps, and I've spent a lot of time searching the web, without success, for photos that do justice to the dramatic nature of the mountains da Cunha describes, as well as for photos of the plants. These sections did seem a little endless, especially without illustrations and maps.

The second part of the book covers the Brazilian army's four campaigns against Antonio Conselheiro (the counselor) who, through his preaching, attracted thousands of the poor and outcast (for various reasons) to the town of Canudos and built a religious community there. Da Cunha attempts to figure out Conselheiro's psychology, and he covers some of the reasons the powers-that-be in Brazil were so outraged by what might seem to be a localized cult, including that Brazil had only recently become a republic and had to be constantly on the lookout for monarchist rebellions. He calls the Canudos "rebellion" as "our Vendée," referring to the monarchist challenge to the French revolution. The material on the movements of the different units of the armies arrayed against Canudos also cries out for maps.

Militarily, the Brazilian army committed one mistake after another, including expecting regular army units to know what to do about guerrilla warfare, underestimating the impact of the terrain on their ability to proceed and to avoid their enemy, getting separated from their supply train, not having enough supplies, letting the enemy capture their weapons and ammunition, and on and on. Da Cunha develops a grudging respect for the jagunços, a term used to refer to the inhabitants of the backlands that can also mean "outlaw" or "cowboy," for their courage, determination, and persistence. He largely credits the eventual success of the Brazilian army, after three failed and one faltering attempt to take the town of Canudos, to an officer named de Bittencourt who finally got their supply trains in order and could regularly supply the troops at the front with food and ammunition. Eventually, the army was able to almost encircle Canudos, bomb the buildings with cannon fire which often set fire to them, and starve the remaining jagunços out, although they continued to fight fiercely until the very end. Except for some prisoners that the army had taken earlier, almost entirely women and children, everyone in Canudos died, often horribly. Atrocities were widespread. Conselheiro himself died of dysentery in the last days of the siege; his body was exhumed by the army and there are pictures of it available on the internet.

In his introduction to my edition, Ilan Stavans says that this book is a classic of Brazilian literature and gave Brazilians a sense of themselves as a people. It was something of a slog at times, but I'm glad I read it. It's given me renewed appreciation for what Vargas Llosa accomplished in The War at the End of the World, and may inspire me to reread it.

100. Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri

What can I say about yet another Inspector Montalbano mystery except that I eagerly await the next one to be translated into English! This one is a little darker than some, and considerably more gruesome than some, and if truth be told I figured out one part of it before Montalbano did. But all in all, it's always a treat to meet the regular characters again and to share Montalbano's meals and detecting.

Congratulations on reaching 100 books this year and for having reviewed all of them so marvellously.

Thank you, Paul!

Rebecca - When I was a brash and incautious interloper in my early days in the group you, quite rightly, gave me pause. I was drawn to your thread because of your choice of reading and your analysis of what you've read. I am still drawn but I do hope I am not quite the incautious interloper I was once.

I am thankful for all my friends in LT, you included, my dear. Have a wonderful thanksgiving weekend.

How suitable for book #100 to be a Camilleri mystery! The perfect holiday treat for you.

So, what did you decide to do with the WW1 reading?

Thank you, Paul, for that lovely note!

Suzanne, I picked the Camilleri to be #100, because I wanted it to be something I knew I would like. About the WW1 reading, are you referring to the MacMillan book that I referred to on your thread? I do plan to buy it and read it, but there are so many other books I'm interested in reading first that it may take me a while to get to it.

100 is a nice round figure, Rebecca. Congratulations on a milestone I won't even dream about until I retire.

101. The Masterpiece by Émile Zola

In this volume of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola explores the Parisian art world and artistic creativity, principally that of the protagonist, painter Claude Lantier, but also that of other painters, sculptors, journalists, and even a writer loosely based on Zola himself. Lantier is a son of Gervaise, the force of nature from L'assommoir, but was sent back to Plassans to go to school. His friendship with Sandoz (the Zola figure) and Dubuche (who becomes an architect) dates from those years, when the three of them walked for hours and even days over the Provençal landscape, dreaming of coming to Paris and revolutionizing the art world. (This really happened with Zola and Cezanne and a man called Baptistin Baille, who Wikipedia tells me became a professor of science; more on Cezanne later.)

There is a lot about the politics of the art world in this novel, including how various dealers operate. The famous Salon des Refusés of 1863, when works rejected by the official Paris Salon for its exhibition were shown in an annex by the decree of the emperor, is a highlight early in the book. Manet exhibited his "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" there, and in the novel Lantier exhibits a painting similar in some ways called "Plein air"; it is roundly jeered. Nonetheless, his "plein air" ideas are eventually copied by other artists. Later in the novel, the description of the politics of selecting pictures for the annual Salon becomes much more pointed.

The novel follows the arc of Lantier's career starting with his early days in Paris and focuses a great deal on his obsession with painting, with working every hour of the day, with being blind and deaf to interruptions, and on his artistic theories about being realistic, using natural light from the outdoors, and much more. Observing the paintings in the Salon des Refusés exhibit, Lantier muses:

"Some of the efforts were clumsy, inevitably, and some were childish, but the general tone was admirable and so was the light, a fine, silvery, diffused light with all the sparkle of open air! It was like a window thrown open on all the drab concoctions and the stewing juices of tradition, letting the sun pour in until the walls were as gay as a morning in spring, and the clear light of his own picture, the blue effect that had caused so much amusement, shone out brighter than all the rest. This was surely the long-awaited dawn, the new day breaking on the world of art!" p. 122

Later Lantier gets involved with a woman, Christine; they move to the country for some years and have a son who has some ill-defined health and mental problems. While they are happy there for some time, the siren call of Paris, his friends, and the art world lure Lantier back. He becomes even more obsessed with his work, eventually starting a huge project, the "masterpiece" of the title, that he works on for years and years, never quite getting it the way he wants it. Christine, who adores Lantier, is jealous of his painting and tries to get him to pay more attention to her and the son. Eventually, the plot becomes a little melodramatic.

The stories of Sandoz and some of the other creative people in the novel provide a counterpoint to Lantier's story. Some are successful, some sell out, some fail. Not surprisingly, Sandoz comes off very well; although he too is obsessed with his writing, he has a more well rounded life than Lantier, marrying a woman who seems delightful and hosting regular Thursday night dinners for his friends, dinners that become more elaborate as his novels begin to sell. Like Zola himself, he is writing a cycle of novels with a purpose:

"Look. The idea is to study man as he really is. Not this metaphysical marionette they've made us believe he is, but the physiological human being, determined by his surroundings, motivated by the functioning of his organs . . . That's the point we start from, the only possible basis for our modern revolution. The inevitable death of the old conception of society and the birth of a new society, and that means a new art is bound to spring up in a new ground . . . Oh, that's bound to happen! A new literature for the coming century of science and democracy!" p. 154

In this book, Zola describes the scenery of Paris in a painterly manner; it is filled with light and visual imagery to a degree I don't recall from works of his I've read earlier. There are also funny parts, and earthy parts, but a lot of the novel is sad and even horrifying as the reader sees Lantier's obsession taking hold of him in an unproductive and unhealthy way; since he comes from the Macquart side of the family, the reader expects some self-destructive tendency to become apparent.

Now to the controversy. Zola sent a copy of the book to his friend Cezanne, who then never spoke to him again. According to the introduction to my Oxford World's Classics edition, Zola based some personal characteristics on Cezanne, others on Manet, and of course made others up. But this was much talked about back in the day.

This was not my favorite of Zola's novels -- parts of it moved slowly and parts were melodramatic -- but the ins and outs of the art world were fascinating and so was the portrait of Paris.

Nice review, Rebecca. I haven't read any Zola--perhaps I should try. I am very intrigued with the Cezanne gossip.

And congrats on 100!

Thanks, Rhonda. By now I've read a lot of Zola, so if you want recommendations let me know. The first one I read, Germinal, is still my favorite, but there were several others I really loved too.

Rebecca, if I'm looking for Zola, do I need to worry about who the translator is? Do you know if there are "good" or "bad" editions to watch out for?

I'm glad you asked that question, Rosalita, because it does make a difference. The early English translations of Zola were bowdlerized because you could say things in France then that you couldn't publish in England. If you scroll down this Wikipedia page about the Rougon-Macquart cycle, you will find a list of relatively recent English translations. Unfortunately, not all of the novels in the cycle have been translated into English recently, but I am working my way through the ones that have been.

ETA In fact, in this book, there was one sentence that I was surprised you could even say in France then, but maybe it went over the head of the censors.

Thanks for that link! It will be very useful when I'm browsing at the library or used bookstore. It sounds as though these don't need to be read in any particular order?

There is a suggested reading order for the Rougon-Macquart cycle on that same Wikipedia page, but really they can all be read independently. I started with Germinal, which is still my favorite, and as they are uneven, I think that would be a good one to start with. After I read a few out of order, I'm now working my way through the cycle following that sequence.

Sorry, I got confuddled. I was conflating WW1 with the Versailles Treaty and your quest for global reads and my comments in #202. Sigh, my brain is working in strange, oblique ways today.

Rebecca - I am close to agreement with you about Germinal being the very best of Zola but I think your view about it being the first is even more persuasive. My first was La Bete Humaine and ranks as my own favourite although I doubt upon close reflection whether it is the best. L'Assommoir, La Terre, Nana and La Debacle are also extremely strong contenders.
I don't think it matters overly in which order they are read.

Not to worry, Suzanne. As it turns out, the World War I idea didn't get enough votes in Reading Globally: our four theme reads for 2014 will be sub-Saharan Africa, travelogues, Central America, and postwar Germany (1945-now). We still need leaders for the last two, so anyone who is interested can come over here and find out more.. End of commercial!

Paul, I also rank L'assommoir and Nana among the best Zolas I've read, along with The Kill, which was like a train wreck waiting to happen; I liked The Belly of Paris a lot too. I still have La Bete Humaine, La Terre, and Le Debacle to read, so I'm glad to know you consider them "strong contenders"! I agree you don't have to read them in any order.

102. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal

I really liked the central idea of this book -- a painting created over the course of 60 years on rolls of canvas ultimately extending more than 4 kilometers. And some of the writing was beautiful, and I could see that the author wanted to use the painting to explore communication among families. But the plot that went along with this was a little convenient, and the revelation of family secrets a tad obvious.

Juan Salvatierra has died when the novella opens, but the reader learns his backstory: after a gruesome riding accident as a child, he became mute (whether for physiological or psychological reasons is unknown). He was apprenticed to a painter, later got a job at the post office, married, and had children. At the age of 20, he starts painting on these canvas rolls, recording what is happening in his life and in the community, and continues, with one roll per year, until is death. His two sons return from Buenos Aires (Salvatierra lived, and they grew up, near a river that forms the border between Argentina and Uruguay) to figure out whether a cultural institution will take the rolls of painting. While looking at the rolls, they discover that one is missing, hence the missing year, and the narrator, son Miguel, decides to investigate. Needless to say, family secrets are revealed in the course of his exploration.

I read this novella in one afternoon, and I did enjoy it. Especially after reading Zola's The Masterpiece, it was interesting to experience another artist's mode of creation and read about the images he painted. But, in the end, I felt the author was trying to do something "meaningful" and didn't quite achieve it, and I also felt he tied up the loose ends too neatly.

Nice review of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, Rebecca; I'll definitely pass on reading it.

>223 rebeccanyc:: As it turns out, the World War I idea didn't get enough votes in Reading Globally
Rebecca, I thought you might like to know that the Virago Modern Classics group is doing a Great War Theme Read with a main selection and alternates every two months. The books are written by authors who have been published by Virago, Persephone, or a small press with a similar ethos.

The reading list is on the a group wiki page, here. Preliminary discussion about the theme and relevant books can be found on this thread.

Thanks, Laura, for those links. I will add them to the Reading Globally thread as those books would be a nice complement to whatever global reading people may be doing on their own.

103. Deep Rivers by José Maria Arguedas

This was a haunting and at times painful book to read. It is the story of Ernesto, a white Peruvian boy who was relegated to he kitchen by the relatives he was sent to live with and thus was raised by the Indian servants and came to speak their language, Quechua, and love their culture, especially their relationship to the natural world. When he got a little older, his father, a not-so-successful itinerant lawyer, took him with him as he traveled around the Andes seeking work.

As the story opens, the father is taking his son to see his estranged brother, known as the Old Man, in the ancient city of Cuzco. The Spanish colonial walls built on top of the remains of Inca stone buildings set the symbolic stage for the rest of the book, for Ernesto is caught between the two cultures. Later, father and son go to the town of Abancay, where the father hopes to stay but ultimately leaves his son at a Catholic boarding school. It is there that most of the novel takes place.

Although the usual pranks and even some terrible cruelties take place at the school -- most horribly the opaquely described repeated rapes of a mentally unstable woman called "the Idiot" -- most of Ernesto's time there is spent inside his own unhappy and lonely head. The most moving and lyrical parts describe his connection to nature, not just animals and plants but the mountains and rocks and rivers, all of which in Quechua culture have much greater significance than in white culture, and are often even personified. Aruguedas, whose early life was similar to Ernesto's, frequently uses Quechua words and Quechua songs to illustrate Ernesto's deep love of the culture and its conflict with the powers that be. Ernesto is also drawn to the myths and spirits and music of the Indian culture and endows a top he receives as a gift with the powers of communication.

I found it a little difficult to keep track of who the various schoolboys were, but I think this was intentional, as they are really more symbols of different aspects of white and mestizo upbringings than fully developed characters. Although there is not much of a plot, a couple of things of significance happen, including an uprising by local woman because the distribution of salt has been halted; feeling himself connected more to these women than to the society inside his school, Ernesto runs after them, drawing the ire of the powerful but condescending priest, the Rector, who runs the school. (Later, however, in the wake of another trouble that strikes the area, the Rector will try to protect Ernesto.) Following the uprising, the troops come to town, and that gives Arguedas the opportunity to further contrast people from the coastal regions with those from the highlands, and to further show the conflicts between the descendants of the colonialists and the indigenous populations.

Mostly, as I said, this book is about Ernesto, and the tragedy of his alienation from both worlds which leads to his living so much in his own dreams and odd ideas.

"I wanted to see Salvinia, Alcira, and Antero. And then to become a falcon and soar over the towns where I had once been happy; to descend to the levels of the rooftops, following the streams that bring water to the settlements, hovering for a moment over the familiar trees and stones that mark the boundary of the tilled fields and, later, calling down from the depths of the sky." p. 161

Because Ernesto is the center of the book, and because he is so unhappy and feels so out of place, this was in places a difficult book to read. The ending of the book is ambiguous, and not a little shocking.

Arguedas, who was also raised by Indian servants in a home in which his white stepmother despised him, became an ethnologist and ultimately killed himself. My edition had an interesting afterword by fellow Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa.

Wonderfully written review Rebecca!

#3: Yes, I know I am going clear back to the beginning of the thread, but that book looks right up my alley. I read The Decipherment of Linear B a couple of years ago and would love to learn more.

Thank you, Manuel.

Great to see you here, Stasia. I haven't read The Decipherment of Linear B, but I gather that in The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Margalit Fox uncovers the important role played by Alice Kober for the first time. It was a fascinating book.

#231: Yep, I think the Fox book is a must read for me. Thanks again for the recommendation!

104. Scars by Juan José Saer

When I read on the Reading Globally South American theme read thread that Saer is considered one of the top Argentinian authors, I knew I had to move this book to the top of my TBR pile. And yes, Saer is an amazing writer, whose language flows on the page. And yes, he has an imagination and a remarkable ability to focus on details. But while I admired this book, I never warmed to it.

At the heart of the novel is a murder: a husband and wife go out duck hunting with a bottle of gin, and she winds up dead. But, until the last section of the novel, which is told from the point of view of the murderer, the book focuses entirely on the narratives of three other people, a journalist, a nonpracticing lawyer, and a judge, all of whom are connected to the aftermath of the murder. These narratives start months before the murder, so the murder is only a peripheral part of their stories.

And what of their stories? The journalist is an 18-year-old who lives with his still partying 36-year-old mother and writes the weather reports for a local paper, although he seems aspire to become a crime reporter. He hangs out with some friends, fights with his mother about their individual bottles of gin and her slutty mode of dressing, thinks a lot about sex, and becomes obsessive about thinking he sees his exact double on the street. In fact, all the narrators are obsessive. The nonpracticing lawyer has become an obsessive gambler, and the details of his lengthy nightly baccarat games are described in infinite detail. The judge is disillusioned about humanity and endlessly describes his automobile routes around the city as well as the "gorillas" who inhabit it. Only the murderer, in his brief section, seems to have the spark of humanity. Also, with the exception of the murderer, the narrators are all involved in literary ventures: the journalist, aside from writing, is a big reader and likes to talk about books; the gambler writes essays about comic book characters, and the judge is translating The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Needless to say, I had to think about why this author is great and what on earth he was trying to do with this book. And here's what I came up with. Partly, Saer is looking at identity and how we create meaning in our lives: the journalist who sees his double and is trying to figure out what his life is about, the lawyer who has become a gambler and obsessively tries to figure out systems for winning, the judge who reduces humanity to "gorillas," yet doesn't hang up on a threatening caller who repeatedly phones him. Partly he is getting inside his characters' heads and relentlessly recording their obsessions. Partly he is showing that what's important to one individual may be meaningless or just a blip to others.

In the end, I was left scratching my head. Saer writes well and gave me food for thought, but I didn't enjoy reading this book. Further, the women in the book are all just adjuncts to the men; none of them rise to being full characters.

105. Open Door by Iosi Havilio

There are several unanswered questions in this puzzling and brief novel by a writer who has been hailed as a great young Argentine writer, among them what happened to a girl who was thought to be dead and why a rare old book turns up in the simple home of an aging ranch worker. But most of the novel is the story of a somewhat hapless young woman, originally an aspiring veterinarian living in a city, who ends up moving in with the aging ranch worker out in the country and doing relatively little other than having a hot romance with a neighboring girl who seems to be sexuality personified. Oh, they try various drugs too.

What gives the novel its title, and the country town its name, is the Open Door, a psychiatric hospital that operates on the principle that the mentally ill shouldn't be locked up but should be able to wander around on their own and find activities that they enjoy; there are no locked doors or gates, but apparently the inmates don't run away. And isn't that just a tidy metaphor for life! We all wander around trying to find ways to enjoy life and there isn't any way to escape.

Havilio writes well, and this was an easy and quick book to read, but I didn't really engage with the narrator or the other characters: the narrator herself seems so passive and the other characters more symbolic than real. There is another book by Havilio that continues the narrator's story, but I'm not very motivated to read it.

106. The Unknown Masterpiece, and Gambara by Honoré de Balzac

This NYRB edition contains two complementary tales of artistic obsession: one about a painter in early 1600s Paris, one about a composer in 1830s Paris.

The first, "The Unknown Masterpiece," involves an elderly famous and wealthy artist, Frenhofer, and two younger artists based loosely on "real" artists: Porbus, who seems to be in his 40s and has achieved some limited success, and Poussin, who is an eager newcomer to Paris. In a remarkable scene, Frenhofer takes up Porbus's palette and with a few brushstrokes dramatically improves his work. The story revolves around a portrait Frenhofer has been working on for ten years of his former mistress (the unknown masterpiece of the title), a portrait he refuses to show to anyone including Porbus and Poussin who are naturally eager to see it. Poussin, despite his youth and inexperience, or perhaps because of these, has a mistress who is described as incomparably beautiful, without any flaws. He develops a plan to ask his reluctant mistress to pose for Frenhofer, in exchange for Frenhofer's allowing the two younger artists to see his portrait. When Frenhofer gives in and lets them see it, they are mystified because they are unable to discern anything except a foot extending from a blur of paint. This story had a remarkable impact on several generations of French painters, including Cezanne (who, according to the introduction to the book, wordlessly indicated that "Frenhofer, c'est moi'') and Picasso.

The second, "Gambara," is the story of an Italian composer living in abject poverty in Paris who is "discovered" by a young Italian nobleman, Count Andrea Marcosini, living in exile in Paris, who believes he has fallen in love with Gambara's wife. In a roundabout scheme to court the wife, who is devoted to her husband but attracted to the count, Andrea asks the composer to describe his opera, which he does at length, both verbally and by introducing his ideas on the piano in an extremely dissonant manner. Later, the three go to a performance of another opera, which Gambara again describes at length, and the count is also introduced to a contraption Gambara has built which replicates the sound of an orchestra, very harmoniously it must be said. Some aspects of Gambara's opera mirror his relationship with his wife, although he seems sadly oblivious to this, and one might see the count's role as a little devilish.

I have only previously read Balzac's novels, and I think I like those better than these much briefer works, whether they are considered stories or novellas. However, I did enjoy these two portraits of artists and Balzac's immersion in their artistic vision, as well as his occasional biting wit. The line for both these artists between obsession and madness is fine one.

I haven't read any of Balzac's shorter works Rebecca although I do have a stash of the stuff in boxes somewhere. I hadn't heard of any of the three previous novelists you reviewed so excellently and it only reinforced my view that there are plenty of novels from that region to be discovered.

Have a lovely weekend.

Thanks for stopping by, Paul. I read those three other novels for the Reading Globally theme read on South America: one of them I heard of on LT, one I got through my subscription to Open Letter (a publisher of translations), and one I picked up from the fiction display table at my favorite bookstore. Otherwise I wouldn't have heard of those authors either.

107. The Red Road by Denise Mina

This latest novel about detective Alex Morrow begins with a horrific scene from 1997 involving a sexually exploited 14-year-old girl and two murders. The scene then shifts to more or less the present, and a web of corruption involving criminal lawyers and the police and possibly Morrow's crime king half brother, as Morrow tries to figure out how a set of fingerprints found at the scene of a recent murder could be an exact match for those of a young man at whose trial she is testifying, a young man who has been locked up in jail the entire time. The reader finds out what happened to that 14-year-old girl and how she is mixed up in the multiple threads of the plot. This is a bleak bleak book that reveals the nastiness and pervasiveness of corruption and the horror of what adults can do to children to further their own ends (sexually and otherwise), as well as the human desire to be loved. I have been finding less of the sense of place in Mina's later novels, and more complexity and psychology.

108. 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning by Slavko Goldstein

This is a stunning and important book, very readable and yet very hard to read. Slavko Goldstein, a Croatian Jewish journalist and publisher, set out to describe not only what happened to his family and him when the Ustasha, a fascist nationalist Croatian military group, returned to Croatia in the wake of the 1941 Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, but also to document as thoroughly what happened generally in Croatia in 1941 and how the impact of those actions reverberated in 1945, at the time of liberation, and then again starting in 1989. He has done this in detail, not shying away from the horrors of ethnic hatred, mass killings, and genocide, and as fairly as possible, attributing responsibility as precisely as the records permit. This is a a book of shining integrity.

At the beginning of the book, Goldstein explains his methods:

"So, in writing this book, I have placed all of my memories under suspicion. I have filled in the gaps and sought to make sense of them by poring over newspapers, official documents, personal letters, and memoirs of the time. My recollections were also on trial in conversations with my brother and with friends from that time whom I still see today. For the description of these times I have relied on the many documents in which I discovered a variety of lesser-known or unknown details that shed better light on the important events of this period. I have tried to be faithful to myself, to future readers of this text, and those about whom I am writing and who are no more."

and then concludes:

" 'For the living we owe respect, but to the dead only the truth' is an often quoted aphorism of Voltaire. To me it seems that we owe the truth to everyone, living and dead, equally. And we owe respect to many, both the living and the dead, but not to everyone." p. 11

It was especially meaningful for me to read this book during the time that Nelson Mandela died and was eulogized and buried. The search for truth Goldstein attempts in this book is analogous in purpose to the aims of the South African Truth and Reconciliation process.

Essentially chronological, the chapters interweave Goldstein's personal story with the documentation of the mass killings and ethnic "cleansings" that took place in the year 1941. Goldstein was 13 when first the Nazis and the Ustasha entered his home town of Karlovac. Two days after the Germans arrived, his father, the proprietor of a bookstore and lending library, was arrested along with about 20 others, including Serbians and communists as well as Goldstein's father and one other Jew. They were first transported to various jails, where Goldstein's mother could visit and bring food to his father, and then to a nearby, newly built concentration camp; ultimately his father was probably shot in one of the many mass killings, although no records exist. Goldstein and his younger brother stayed with his mother until she was arrested, although another family was moved into their apartment, and then were farmed out to brave friends who took them in. His mother was released and joined the partisans with her two sons. Their personal stories are moving and dramatically convey the extreme tension and terror of the times, as well as the mother's courage and the courage of the friends who stood by them.

The Nazis basically left the Ustasha in charge of Croatia, and the goal of the Ustasha was to create a nationalist Croatia: to eliminate not only the Jews and the Roma but perhaps more importantly the Serbians (who were Orthodox, as opposed to the Catholic Croatians). They did so brutally, and in a variety of ways, but principally by arresting/rounding up Serbians in their villages and then taking them out the woods, shooting them, and throwing the bodies into pits or caverns. They also burned Serbian villages to the ground to drive out any remaining women, children, and old people, although they also frequently killed them too. Through detailing the history step by step, Goldstein attempts to understand the original causes of what he calls "ethnic cleansing" as well as the forces that caused it to grow into an ever more horrifying series of events.

Throughout the book, but especially in a chapter entitled "A Tale of Two Villages," Goldstein develops the theme of "the year that keeps returning." By looking at a neighboring Serbian and Croatian village, he shows how the destruction of and mass killings in the Serbian village in 1941 led to fear and some revenge killings in the Croatian village in 1945. For some time after that, they coexisted uneasily, but this all fell apart again in the wars of the early 1990s, when there were mass killings of Croatians. Goldstein repeatedly makes the point that it is wrong to punish the mass of the population for the crimes of individuals. As he writes:

"Today's district of Lasinja includes only two Serbian villages, Sjeničak and Prkos. During the second world war, between 600 and 700 civilian inhabitants of these two villages and more than 100 members of the Partisan army were killed. During the same war and in the immediate postwar period about 150 residents of Lasinja and the Croatian villages were killed and several dozen more were killed in the ranks of the Home Guard and the Partisan and Ustasha armies. The war ended for these victims a long time ago. Is it not time that we stop commemorating them separately and in opposition to each other? They are not all equal victims nor are they equal criminals, but we should stop trying to use our victims in provocations, we should establish who the criminals were and single them out from all collective entities: villages, movements, and peoples alike." p. 465

The end of the book brings the reader up to date, with Goldstein's experiences during the communist era. Starting out as a partisan (and a commissar within his military unit), but then leaving the party and returning to school, he found himself frustrated during a particularly harsh period of the Tito era and going to Israel for a few years, but ended up returning to what he considered his home.

What I would like to convey about this book is that while the history is horrifying (and new to me), it is Goldstein's approach that is so remarkable. His desire to find out the truth and document both the good and the evil so we can know who did what is compelling and moving, and his portraits of individuals and what they did or failed to do is fascinating. He recovers the personal and the individual from the mass of numbers.

At the end of the book, he writes:

"The twentieth century produced the greatest hopes for mankind, but it buried most of them. It became the graveyard of great ideals. It taught us that ideals are most often a seductive chimera and that doubt is not a fatal weakness but a necessary defense against fatal beliefs.

This book was written with such thoughts in mind." pp. 559-560

Excellent review Rebecca, and thanks for bringing this book to my attention- I have ordered it to read sometime in the future.

Hi Rebecca, just stopping by to wish you have a very Merry Christmas Holidays and a Very Happy and Successful 2014. I am looking forward to your reviews and comments for next year.

Thank you, Manuel, for both the compliment and the good wishes, and I hope for the same for you.

Rebecca, long may you remain a constant source of reading inspiration. Hope the festive season finds you well and I look forward to continuing to follow your thread next year. xx

Thanks, Paul, for all the good wishes!

This might be the time to say that I'm debating whether to have a 75 Books thread next year. Over the past several years, I've participated in both 75 Books and Club Read and, as time has passed, there's been more conversation on my Club Read thread than on my 75 Books thread (six threads there this year, two here). That said, I am very happy that my loyal 75 Books friends visit this thread and I enjoy our conversations here -- would you come over and visit my Club Read thread, or should I continue to keep both?

244: I would definitely visit your Club Read thread. I actually have this and it and your non-fiction thread starred, but I don't have enough to say to spread over three threads. Our reading doesn't overlap much, but your reviews are so thorough and thoughtful, they're an education in themselves.

Thanks! I agree that mostly our reading doesn't overlap, but I follow your thread too. I'm thinking of giving up my nonfiction thread next year too, and just keep all my reviews in Club Read (and cross-posting as appropriate to Reading Globally). I follow threads by starring them too, so I would definitely follow people in 75 Books even if I don't have a thread there myself.

I would star your Club Read thread, I already follow a few people there. Came to wish you all the best for the New Year and have been hit with a BB with your review of Slavko Goldstein's book.

Wherever you settle, I will visit, Rebecca. And I must admit it would be easier for me if you had just one thread!

Thanks, Kerry and Linda. I am definitely leaning towards simplifying my LT life and only having one thread next year.

109. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis

I found myself reading more slowly as I neared the end of this magnificent book, a collection of seven novellas, because I was reluctant to leave the world of Maqroll the Gaviero (lookout) and his diverse and far-flung friends. In varying styles, including describing Maqroll as a friend who sends him dispatches from around the globe, Mutis presents the tale of an inveterate wanderer, usually by sea, who consistently gets involved in money-making schemes, often not exactly within the law, that come to naught, who is steadfastly loyal to his friends, and who is given to reading historical books and musing philosophically about the important issues of life.

As the novellas progress, the reader becomes more and more familiar with Maqroll and some of the key episodes of his life, although his origins are murky: he travels on a clearly forged Cyrpiot passport but it is unclear where he was born, and the text hints that he had an unhappy childhood and took to a life at sea (as the lookout who climbed the tallest mast) at an extremely early age. He is older when the novellas begin, and to some extent they jump back and forth in time, so the reader has to figure out which adventure or misadventure came first. And because he is older, there is an elegiac if not downright melancholy feel to his thoughts. This is a fascinating work partly because it combines the downright adventurous with an equal helping of philosophy.

So what of his adventures? They range from traveling up a South American river with somewhat sketchy guides to find some lumber mills, starting a brothel using women who pretend to be stewardesses, engaging in a scheme to substitute lower quality oriental rugs for valuable ancient ones, transporting some mysterious boxes for a highly suspicious person, gold mining, and more. One novella focuses on Maqroll's best friend, Abdul Bashur, another inveterate wanderer, who sprang from a Lebanese family of shipbuilders and ship owners, his family, and his search for the perfect ship, and others involve other unforgettable friends of Maqroll, including a variety of strong women who he has been deeply attached to.

Mutis vividly depicts the environment, whether it's the hot, humid, buggy tropics, the cold of Vancouver, or the activity of a Mediterranean port. Above all, the reader gets a feeling for the sea, for life on freighter and other ships, and for the vibrant seediness (and criminality) of port communities. Mutis was a poet (who apparently wrote about Maqroll in poems long before he got the idea of writing a novella about him), but he was also gainfully employed as a publicist for an oil company and then a US film company, so he presumably traveled to many of the places he "traveled" to as a character in some of these novellas.

Maqroll lived a very full life, full of trials, hardships, love, friendship, adventure, stagnancy, but it is his reflections on literature and life, usually dark, that are as compelling if not more so than his adventures. Does he find a little happiness at the end?

Nice review!

I may abandon my non-fiction thread as well---it is hard to keep track of multiple threads.

I'm happy to say I had a great reading year again and, as usually, have failed at narrowing down my favorite reads. They are listed more or less in reverse order of when I read them.

Best of the Best

Fiction
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (hope to finish today)
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis
A House in the Country by José Donoso
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
Onitsha by J.M.G. Le Clezio
the Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
Kristin Lavransdatterby Sigrid Unset
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
Transit by Anna Seghers
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz
War & War by László Krasznahorkai
The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ourednik
Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
The Toiler of the Sea by Victor Hugo

Nonfiction
1941: The Year That Keeps Returning by Slavko Goldstein
The African by J.M.G. Le Clezio
Dersu the Trapper by V. K. Arseniev
The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox
Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry
An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
My Century by Aleksander Wat
The Black Count by Tom Reiss

The Best of the Rest

Fiction
Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
The Laughing Man by Victor Hugo
The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin
The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia
A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi
Pot Luck by Émile Zola

Nonfiction
Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Rue de Retour by Abdellatif Laabi
The Orientalist by Tom Reiss

Runners-Up
Maira by Darcy Ribeiro
A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel) by Mikhail Bulgakov
La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
Case Closed by Patrik Ourednik
Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou
The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laabi
Murther & Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies
Freud by Jonathan Lear

Fun, Fun, Fun
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey
Dance of the Seagull and Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri
Lots of books by Denise Mina

Duds and Disappointments
Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell about Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough
It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter

Nice wrap-up. There's some good stuff in your lists.

Thanks, Jim!

As I noted above, I am not planning on maintaining a 75 Books thread in 2014. I'll continue to follow many threads in 75 Books, but I am simplifying my life and am going to keep only one reading thread over in Club Read. It is here! I hope those of you who have been participating in my 2013 75 Books thread will come over and visit me there too!

75 Books was the first group I started posting reviews to, back in 2009, and I have enjoyed every minute of it, getting to know so many of you, following your reading, and adding to my groaning TBR piles! Thank you all!

Hi Rebecca--You've had a great reading year--so many "bests" and so few duds. As always, I've enjoyed reading your incisive reviews. Best wishes for the New Year, and I will see you in Club Read!

Last book of the year, finished last night.

110. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

What a wonderful read this was! I was totally absorbed in the well-known tale of a young man who is unjustly imprisoned, makes a remarkable escape, and then seeks revenge on the people who were responsible for his imprisonment. I was amazed by the broad scope of Dumas's imagination, his descriptive abilities, the breadth of his knowledge, his intricate (and I mean intricate) plotting, his juggling of characters, and much more. The character of the Count is also fascinating, even if as a reader I had to suspend disbelief about some aspects of it. And I also had to suspend disbelief for a few of the plot developments at the end.

In the course of what is in essence a story of vengeance, Dumas also paints a damning portrait of Parisian society and depicts the post-revolutionary, post-Napoleon era. As I've been reading more 19th century French literature, I found this fascinating, and the notes to my Oxford World Classics edition were helpful too. Although not addressed in the notes, I also would be interested in knowing whether the inclusion of what was obviously a lesbian couple (well obvious to a 21st century reader 100s of pages before it was confirmed by one of them cutting her hair and dressing as a man) was considered shocking when the book came out in 1844. I know the original English translations were bowdlerized.

This is undoubtedly a tome, but compulsively readable. It was a great book to end the year with.