March 2013 Archives

By Joan Schenkar

An extraordinary biography of a very strange person. Organized thematically, it ranges over Patricia Highsmith's life without being slavish to chronology. In fact, the author thoughtfully provides a chronological summary to help those who feel a bit lost.

Every one of the pages of this long book (over 560 pages with appended material) is worth the time. This is not a literary biography in the strict sense, but it explains a good deal about the odd place in the imagination called, by Ms. Schenkar, "Highsmith country" and helps us begin to understand how the odd people we meet in her books got that way.

There is a great deal of detail about Highsmith's loves, her mixed relationship with her mother, her frugality, her bigotry, and her inability to tolerate ease or comfort in her life. All of this is attested by the material in her "cahiers" as Highsmith called her notebooks. Sometimes Ms. Schenkar seems to drift too far from the evidence in her conclusions, but the ideas she presents are entertaining, if speculative.

Ms. Schenkar has no illusions about her subject's questionable hold on humanity, but she makes us feel some sympathy for this intriguing woman.

Written March 12, 2010 18:15

by Evan Mandery

A new satire by Evan Mandery that blends elements of Douglas Adams's humor, David-Foster-Wallace-style, parenthetical informativeness (sans that annoying footnote typography) and meta-fictional intrusiveness. Sober themes in a comic mode.

Delightful entertainment.

Written March 8, 2010 09:42

by Peter Cameron

This English "domestic" novel is similar, in its way to Brookner's Rules of Engagement. Cameron, however, must travel further back to make his characters credible; all the way back to post-WW II England. He has managed to pull this off quite nicely, creating a story that could serve as the basis for a Douglas Sirk film.

Coral Glynn is a nurse who comes to Maj. Clement Hart's house to care for his dying mother. Hart, himself, is a wounded veteran of the war. He has refused the skin grafts that his surgeons have recommended and continues to suffer from the pain and immobility that his wounds produce.

Coral is a passive person, unable to stand up for herself, even to the housekeeper Mrs. Prence, a small-minded, even cruel woman. She is the victim of a sexual assault from the father of children she was called in to care for. She does nothing about this. She is also unable to decide what she really wants for herself when Maj. Hart proposes to her. She is introduced to friends of Clement's, Robin a friend from Clement's past and his wife Dolly.

Ensuing complications make clear that Robin is in love with Clement and that they have a "past." Clement, though, has decided to put away childish things, for this is how he sees their relationship, and marry, as so many gay men would do in those years (J. M. Keynes comes to mind.).

A crime is committed in the vicinity of the Major's house and Coral is involved, innocently, but the machinations of Mrs. Prence and the vagaries of the local constabulary make it seem that Coral must leave to go into hiding. She later lives in London, working for the NHS. Clement has assumed that Coral has thought better of the marriage and has not contacted him for that reason. Coral has written, but her letters have gone astray.

Clement tries to begin with her again, but Coral's spine begins to stiffen ever so slightly and she becomes, at last, more decisive.

Peter Cameron has provided an enjoyable period novel the plot of which his writing makes acceptable, even palatable.

by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes has a gift for biographical writing. His latest book is a gripping narrative about the Romantic movement and its members' fascination with science and discovery. This was the era that brought professionalism to science, even giving us the very word, 'scientist.'

Holmes begins with Joseph Banks who accompanied James Cook on his first voyage in HM Bark Endeavour as the naturalist. His observations of the native people of the island of Tahiti is surprising in an English culture known for its sense of self-superiority. Banks was not immune to this sense, but he was able to stifle it to permit himself to observe objectively. He returned to acclaim and a position as the president of the Royal Society. He was instrumental in encouraging scientists and explorers alike.

A chapter on balloonists and their hopes to conquer the sky are described next. Curiously, one of the first thoughts that occurred to contemporaries was the potential for warfare. The English were concerned that the French would be able to deliver troops to their island by a fleet of troop-carrying balloons.

A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the Herschel family, William, his younger sister Caroline and his son, John. The story of these dedicated scientists is well observed, especially the portion about William and his sister.

Another explorer that Banks encouraged was Mungo Park, a man one hardly hears of nowadays. He sought to explore the Niger River and find its source, risking life and limb to do so. The description of how the purpose of his trip was co-opted for colonialist ends makes for sad reading.

The life and work of Humphry Davy, arguably the first chemist, takes two chapters. His thorough study of chemical interactions, his discoveries and his inventions are thoroughly covered.

The impact of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is evaluated in a chapter called "Dr. Frankenstein and the Soul." Holmes reviews the Vitalist controversy and helps us see how the book reflects the concerns of its author, and her associates, with science and its role in society.

The last two sections cover Michael Faraday and John Herschel, mostly. The detail in these latter chapters is lacking in comparison to the wealth of the earlier chapters. Extensive chapters on both these men would have been welcome, especially the younger Herschel.

Holmes's bibliography is a fine one and a thorough one and will serve as a valuable resource for readers willing to explore further. He also provides thumbnail sketches of the lives of many of the persons who appear in the book, and some who don't, in an appendix.

This book is one that deserves all the accolades it has received. It does not disappoint.

Written April 1, 2010 15:16

by Theodore C. Bestor

This is an anthropologist's study of the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market, commonly known as the Tsukiji Market. He examines the history of the place, the organization of its buyers and sellers, its relationship to the wider community and its particular place in Japanese life and in how the the Japanese people understand themselves. It is a comprehensive treatise that has its longeurs, but continues to fascinate throughout.*

The market is a curious place, partly self-governing through the traditions of the buyers and sellers, but also controlled tightly by the Tokyo municipal government. It is the largest wholesale market in the world for fish and other seafood. The perishable nature of the products makes its efficient operation crucial to a nation that relies on fresh seafood daily.The daily auctions are a highlight for tourists may be seen in several videos on YouTube, such as this one which gives a sense of the place and its energy.

Prof. Bestor has spent years studying the entire market and knows it better than most of its participants. From the past (the original Nihonbashi, or "fish quay," market in Edo was destroyed in the 1923 earthquake) to the future (planners have hoped to move the market for years to a nearby site, but have been frustrated by various problems, including pollution problems at new site), we come to know the place very well indeed.

This is an engrossing look at the place of commerce in the life of a modern nation and how the buyers and sellers have constructed a place that serves the needs of both groups, while maintaining high standards. Even the fairness in the use of space has been accounted for by means of reallocations that take place from time to time using a lottery system.

The detail in this fine work is breathtaking. It is a brilliant tribute to the market and its denizens.

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*It is a well-known book and received an homage from a later author, Gordon Mathews, in the title of his book, Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, described in an earlier post on this site (see link here).

by Paul Auster

Paul Auster is, in my mind, without doubt one of the best novelists writing. Invisible is a gripping coming-of-age narrative. There is more of Patricia Highsmith than J. D. Salinger in this story of a terrifying event that left its mark on a young Columbia University student in 1967. It continued to exercise power over him to the end of his life.

The novel is written from two points of view, that of Adam Walker and that of his friend from his undergraduate days, James Freeman, himself a successful writer. This shifting of viewpoints is never confusing and gives the book density and a rich complexity.

Written March 8, 2010 09:51

by David Rakoff

by Patricia Highsmith

My recent re-reading of Patricia Highsmith's first successful novel makes me see it to be far stranger than Hitchcock was able to convey in his film. This is a symptom of sensibilities circa 1951, perhaps, or a certain diffidence on Hitchcock's part. No matter why, the film makes many changes to the plot and dramatis personae, some consequential, some in-.

Guy Haines is a young, promising architect rather than a dilettantish amateur tennis player. Charles Anthony Bruno is changed to Bruno Anthony. The mise en scène is shifted from the American southwest to the northeast megalopolis (extending from DC to NYC to CT). Bruno is an amoral dipsomaniac in both the film and the book. The principal difference is that Guy is feckless and insubstantial and, in the end, the creepiest person in the book.

The two men meet and Bruno insinuates himself into Guy's life in a way that is almost unstoppable. We see most of the events in both from Guy's viewpoint, so we can get to thoroughly dislike him. By the end of the book it's clear that neither deserves to get away with murder.

There is a private detective character in the book, an employee of the late Mr. Bruno, who makes it his mission to solve the murder of Bruno's father. He is relentless, kind of an Inspector Javert without the ruth, but neither of these two is a Jean Valjean. It's a pleasure to see the noose tightening around the two.

In the film Citizen X, Max von Sydow plays a psychiatrist, Bukhanovsky, who tells the police commissioner and his chief detective/pathologist, after assessing their complementary characters, "Together you make a wonderful person." Guy Haines and Bruno come up much short of even this minimal achievement.

One might give this book a logline: "This weirdo killed my wife then wanted quid pro quo; he kept annoying me, so, I murdered his father to shut him up."

Written April 1, 2010 14:33

by Michael Ian Black

by Demetri Martin

Demetri Martin is a humorist, not merely a comic. This book is full of a dazzling variety of funny stuff, from a sendup of crosswords to an intriguing short story about life after death. This is a very entertaining book. I will be very disappointed with people who do not read it.

by Alan Glynn

A political thriller by an Irish writer who manages to combine the Irish economic crisis, the international commodities business, political shenanigans in the U.S., a Blackwater-like operations company, and the exploitation of Africans in mineral mining into a readable and compelling novel.

The book opens in The Republic of Congo with sudden death and quickly moves around the world. Jimmy Gilroy is writing a biography of an actress who died in a helicopter crash on the Donegal coast of Ireland. A chat with Larry Bolger, ex-Taoiseach or Prime Minister of Ireland, and recently fallen off the wagon, leads Jimmy to think that the helicopter crash is more than an accident. His father's old friend in the newspaper business tries to wave him off, but this, of course, has no effect.

Jimmy's inquiry sets in motion more attempts at cover-up and complications proliferate. The scenes move quickly from one character and scene to another. We go to Italy, Dublin, New York, and Congo. The book keeps us riveted right to the climax at nearly the very end. The entire novel is written in the omniscient mode and we get to think along with all the characters. This permits us to feel some sympathy for all but the chief villain of the work, a Moriarty-like private-equity fund owner named Jimmy Vaughn. He is the primum mobile, but he is also the character about whom we know least. Mr Glynn promises us more of this character and others in his new book.

by Michael Lewis

It is rare when a book written over twenty years ago has an immediacy and relevance for contemporary life. Michael Lewis's memoir of his early career selling bonds for Salomon Brothers (SB) in the mid-80s is such a book. It shows how the seeds of later crises were planted in that decade by the personalities he describes. [One of the developers of collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) worked in the mortgage group at Salomon Brothers (Lewis Ranieri).] The reader is like a fly on the wall as the antecedents of the 2008 crisis developed.

The book is full of humor and provides a quick, non-technical education in the mechanics of the bond world. Lewis started out as clueless as most of us about that world of gilts, bunds, Treasuries and corporates, but he learned enough as a middleman to be able to do his job fairly well. His explanation of junk bonds is particularly useful. From the odd circumstances through which he obtained the job, through his training and assignment to the London branch of SB, to the end of his association with SB, Lewis's portrait of the people at the company never fails to amuse and entertain. 

by Michael Ondaatje

by Peter Carey

by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

This book is a combination of literary biography and social history. In reading it we learn about the early career of Charles Dickens and we learn about the social and literary milieu at that time, just before the accession of Victoria to the throne. The book has a distinct academic flavor, but is immensely readable.

Dr. Douglas-Fairhurst is well-read in the literature of Charles Dickens. He describes various themes in Dickens's writing, and he provides many examples of their appearance in the novels, his many other writings and in his letters. He discusses Dickens's relationships with publishers, friends and family. All this is to help us understand how Dickens became a journalist, then "Boz," and, finally, Charles Dickens the world-renowned novelist. We also learn about Dickens's excursions into writing for the theater—short-lived, but rather more successful than Henry James's attempts later in the century.

The documentation is thorough and includes references to many of the writings of Dickens's contemporaries. This helps us to understand how Dickens was viewed in his time and how the times changed as he lived through them. For example, Pickwick Papers is full of travel via coach. Before long, the railroad had displaced this leisurely, if uncomfortable, pace with travel at the heady speed of 40 miles per hour. This was seen as interfering with the pleasures of travel. One can only imagine what they might have made of modern high-speed trains traveling at five times that speed.

Dickens was an extraordinary writer. His popularity continues to this day, when contemporaries of his are lost to us. He created characters that we've come to know, even when we haven't read the work. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has given us a wonderful understanding of how he became the writer he was.

by Edward St. Aubyn

This is the first of a series of novels about the life of Patrick Melrose. It takes place in a short day and a half in the south of France when Patric is a boy. The chapters take up different characters, including Patrick's father and mother, David and Eleanor; acquaintances of theirs, Anne and Victor, who are staying nearby; another couple, Nicholas and Bridget, who are staying at the Melrose's house; and other characters, including the servants and a man named Vijay, who serves as a voice heard off, as it were.

David Melrose is a snob and a cruel one at that. He treats his wife abominably and she is unable to resist this treatment, even though she is the one with the money. He is also a criminal, abusing his son Patrick. He seems to hold Nicholas and, to a lesser extent, Victor in thrall. They seem willing to dance attendance on him. The women, Anne and Bridget, seem less susceptible.

The enjoyment from what might have been a dreary novel comes out of the interactions with other characters—we see them all from inside their own heads—they all seem so tame and feckless in the face of the onslaughts that David M. makes on civilized behavior. No one can confront him. Anne finds Patrick upset and tries to obtain his mother for him, but David is able to see all and forces his wife to ignor the boy, enlisting the all to willing assistance of Nicholas.This seems to be St. Aubyn's commentary on a class society.

It is a grim little volume, but with a nicely executed style and an eye for setting and character. No interpretation from the author, just self-interpretation and judgments of one character on another. The novels to come will deal with the consequences of the ills that infest this book.

By Sam Lipsyte

I first encountered Sam Lipsyte in The New Yorker. His story, "Deniers," appeared in the issue of  2 May, 2011. I've managed to miss previous stories by this writer. Unfortunate for me. "Deniers" is an engrossing piece of modern fiction about Mandy, a cardio ballet teacher and crack addict. Her father is in a nursing home. She meets a man at her meeting who has a considerable set of neo-Nazi prison tattoos. The story is written from Mandy's point of view but with an omniscient (sort of) narrator. It is one of the best stories to appear in The New Yorker in months. That is how I found out about Mr. Lipsyte.

I first read his novel Home Land, a satiric look at suburban life taking the form of entries by a alumnus who writes updates to his high school's alumni newsletter; at least he tries to, being frustrated by the editor who cleans up his entries, reducing them to pap, or ignores them altogether. The book is very entertaining, and, like his story "Deniers" has a strong component of revisiting the past.

Most recently, I read his book The Ask. Milo Burke, an painter manqué, works for the development office at Mediocre University in New York City. Mr. Lipsyte, thus, gives subtlety the gate. Milo has lost his job by losing his patience with a self-involved student who reported his directness (a not misplaced critique of her art) to her major donor father. Milo's marriage is in trouble, for various reasons. His relationship with his son is still firm, but he has no confidence in his ability to be a father. 

Milo gets an opportunity to get his job back by working with a donor on a major "ask." The donor, referred to by his surname, Purdy, requested him by name. Milo is, thus, drawn back into reliving his college student days. These elements are layered together into an amalgam of Milo's various confrontations, problems, failures, as he attempts to make sense of his life and find direction. Often self-destructive, Milo is not necessarily a likable character, but his problems are much like all of our problems and it is hard not to have sympathy for him in his travails.

The most salient aspect of Mr. Lipsyte's style, especially in the novels, is the sense we have of his surfing the combers of language. At one point he veers off onto the story of family wiped out in an accident on the BQE, and Milo meditates on how Jimmy, a smoker, was absolved by the premature exit from his life of ever going down in history as a bad father. "Whereas me, I still had a decent shot."

So glad I finally discovered Sam Lipsyte.

by Mavis Gallant

This collection by Mavis Gallant was published in 1979. It has the distinction of being the single largest source of stories (six in all) in the recent collection of Ms. Gallant's work from New York Review Books, entitled Paris Stories. The stories in From the Fifteenth District are all interesting and readable, but some are among her best.

"The Remission" is set in the French Riviera, and it tells of the end of life of Alec Webb. He occupies a minimal role in the story, fading quickly from his family's life as he dies of an unknown, but terminal, illness. The remission of the title is ironic, as one comes to expect in a story by Mavis Gallant. The 'remission' is merely the protracted death that Alec suffers. The story is lengthy and full of incident, but it is somewhat quotidian incident. It is peopled by Barbara, her children, their governess, and their neighbors in the local English colony. By the time he leaves his life, the money his sister has provided from her savings has gone, partly due to the improvident spending of his wife; Barbara has taken up with another man, Eric Wilkinson; and they have left Barbara's brothers' house, Lou Mas, and are living in another part of town.

Barbara sees Alec every day, never misses in fact, but it is clear that he had dwindled from their lives, as the dying always do. Barbara has blossomed, though, and Ms. Gallant ends her story after the funeral at a party arranged by a neighbor for the mourners. Alec is acknowledged at the end. 'It then happened that every person in the room, at the same moment, thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say "No, thank you" or "Oh, really?" or "Yes, I see," was enough to create the dark gap marking the of Alec's span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.'

Written August 19, 2011 20:26

by Haruki Murakami

Nathan Keller, writing in Slate, remarks that Murakami's writing "reads, paragraph-to-paragraph, as some of Murakami’s weakest writing in years." I find that my opinion is quite the opposite. It is the strength of the book that the writing is engrossing. I felt that the 925 pages could have gone on further with no loss of readability. It is in the details of the plot that the weakness of the book lies. It has the feel of an allegory, but it is an allegory in service of nothing in particular and we end up with a shaggy book that should have taken a turn into the realm of character instead of into its surreal and frustrating plot.

I had hoped as I began to read that Murakami would explore the Aum Shinrikyo cult through the lens of his fiction, as he did in his non-fiction interviews with victims and perpetrators of 2001, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. The cult in 1Q84, called Sakigake, is clearly modeled on Aum Shinrikyo, but it is a voice heard off, rather than the center of the story. The two principals, Aomame and Tengo, are tied indirectly to the cult and are followed in alternate chapters through the novel. Their stories come together in a 19th Century way, but the ties between them are revealed along with their stories, rather than being sprung at the end, as the Victorian novelists were fond of doing. A third character, Ushikawa, who alternates with Aomame and Tengo beginning in Book 3, is a strange man who is hunting Aomame on behalf of the cult. He is a much more intriguing and developed character. With Ushikawa, we have a glimpse of what the book could have been. 

The ideas that Murakami explores in this book come piecemeal, and a more coherent narrative would have been welcome. The book is not his finest (that, for me, is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but it is worth the investment in time that it demands.

by Christopher Hitchens

By Don DeLillo

The quality of the writing makes it all the more frustrating that the potential in this book is essentially unrealized. The writer's voice is engrossing and the issues he raises are intriguing. However, we are brought near the edge and taken from it before we can peer over.

The novel is bookended by the experience of an unnamed character as he views an installation at MOMA, a film project called "24 Hour Psycho," by Douglas Gordon. The Hitchcock film plays at a frame rate that requires about 24 hours to complete. DeLillo conveys the experience of this work in a manner that has us wishing that there were more depths for him to plumb.

The middle of the book, "the meat in a slender fictive sandwich," as author Geoff Dyer put it in his NY Times review of 5 Feb 2010 is a narrative that takes place in the Sonoran desert of the American southwest. Another filmmaker, Jim Finley, is visiting with one of the architects/planners of the war in Iraq, a man named Elster. He has a concept for a film that will require only that Elster speak his mind in any way he chooses against a plain brickwork background.

If it is the art is partly the process of choice, I'm afraid Jim Finley is not much of an artist. There is very little concept in this project of his. His idea for convincing Elster is to sit drinking with him until he agrees to do it. This doesn't happen.

What intervenes is the arrival of Elster's daughter, Jessie. At first this helps the reader a bit. Things become more interesting, but DeLillo seems afraid to let these people interact. After a few days of her visit, the daughter disappears mysteriously and we are left high and dry.

The end of the book has the man watching "24 hour Psycho" the second day. He meets a woman. He clumsily gets her phone number and the book peters out on that note. The reader struggles to construct a possible connection between this watcher, the woman and the action in the desert. There is too little to go on, though.

John Cheever in his story "The Death of Justina," from 1962, says, "Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing." The vision that DeLillo served in this novel has done just that--come to nothing.

Written March 16, 2010 16:34

by Liz Moore

This novel has a charming way of luring the reader into its strange, sad world. The two central characters are all alone, forced by choice and circumstance into lives not entirely of their choosing. Whether this is because of their timidity or a hostile world is difficult to say. Liz Moore succeeds in creating vivid inner lives for them and making them sympathetic.

Arthur Opp is the only son of an English architect, living in his parents' house in Brooklyn. He relies on money provided by his father to live a live cut off from the outside world. He uses delivery services, online purchasing and other strategies to keep himself occupied, fed and entertained.

Kel Keller is a 17-year-old who lives with his mother in Pells Landing (perhaps a disguised Pelham Manor). He feels himself to be an outsider in this well-to-do, middle class town, having come from Yonkers and able to attend the local high school because his mother once worked there.

Ms. Moore has a very readable style and a clever approach to drawing us in to the stories of these two men. It is Kel's mother, Charlene, who is the nexus between their two lives. The book's first section introduces Arthur and Charlene, both. She met him when she took a course in literature during a short-lived college career, becoming his friend and meeting him in a limited social way after the class had ended. It is the irrational application of undoubtedly rational rules by university administrators, that drives Arthur into his isolation from which he is only drawn out, years later, by Charlene's communication with him.

The second section introduces Kel and his life in high school. He is a strong athlete and has the potential to become a major league baseball player. He is socially adept and forms friendships easily. There is a basic divide within him that stems from the move from Yonkers, which he considers his real home. Kel spends a great deal of time coping with his mother's alcoholism and fantasizing about his absent father. A crisis precipitates Kel into veering from the path he thought he was on.

In the last section of the book, the stories of Arthur and Kel alternate chapter by chapter. The resolution of their stories is not inevitable, and Kel's takes him back to Yonkers, to Queens and, finally, to Brooklyn. He must confront his mother's life, his own life, and the lives of several other people before his life comes to a resolution that is welcome and believable. Arthur is also drawn out, literally it happens, by a maid, Yolanda, whome he has hired to clean his neglected house. Arthur's changed circumstances lead him to Prospect Park (an apt name as it has a beneficial effect on his prospects) and to a dinner party for his neighbors.

The book never feels artificial or pat, especially because Ms. Moore's style is so engaging and her characters so intriguing.

by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis began life as an undergraduate in art history at Princeton, progressed to an MSc from the London School of Economics and ended up as a former bond salesman for Salomon Brothers. This is the second book by Mr. Lewis that I've read, the first being Liar's Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, published in 1989, (see my entry on that book here). Perhaps his best-known book is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, published in 2003. It is a look at managing a baseball team using a statistical approach. It was recently made into a film with Brad Pitt.

Mr. Lewis gives us a tour d'horizon of the results of the 2008 financial crisis—turned financial collapse in some places. This débâcle was caused by the ocean of cheap credit that flooded the world as nations borrowed more and more and spent more and more. It serves as a litmus test of character for each nation. Different nations responded to this "free" money in different ways. He begins with interviews in the United States, moves on to scrutinize several European nations. He is a kind of economic flâneur, taking the opportunity to talk to as many of the principals as he can. Many of these persons are surprisingly forthright.

Lewis's style is journalistic, but it is laced with frequent flashes of humor, sometimes at his own expense. He approaches technical matters with a light touch and manages to explain them without resorting to excessive jargon.

The scale of the blunders, missteps and outright arrogant stupidity that he documents is staggering. An Icelandic fisherman leaves behind a long career at sea to take up investment banking. When asked by Mr. Lewis what made him think that a risk-filled life on the ocean had prepared him for financial speculation, he pauses and responds, "That's a very good question." But he has no answer.

Lewis also takes the time to look for the various Cassandra's who gave warnings of the insupportability of the status quo. Morgan Kelly, an Irish economist, wrote an articles on the Irish housing bubble and its likely collapse for the Irish Times. He created a furore. His second article, he thought, should go to a publication with a larger circulation for broader impact. He tried the larger newspapers, including the Irish Independent, but no one bit. He was treated as a traitor to Ireland. His second article went to the Irish Times, as well. Fields of unfinished (and never to be finished) developments outside Dublin are mute testimony to how well Kelly's compatriots listened.

Lewis next moves on to Greece where the scale of the irresponsibility is difficult to believe. Greeks do not, as a matter of course, pay taxes. They fiddle home purchases to avoid paying the full rate for property values; Lewis suggests that the entire Greek parliament is guilty of this particular sin. The avoid paying income and sales taxes as well. Tax inspectors who blow the whistle are isolated by their superiors, taken out of the field and given desk jobs or fired outright. The entire economy is a sham, but Greece kept borrowing Euros as if the well were bottomless.

On, at the end, to Germany. Even the Germans, less affected by the 2008-2009 crisis in the longer term than other nations, were caught up in the frenzy. One Düsseldorf bank could be relied upon to buy sub-prime mortgage securities right up to and almost after the knell of doom had sounded.

At the end, he comes back to the U.S. to examine the effect of the collapse on states and municipalities, using California as the most extreme and clearest example. The book features an intriguing interview with the former California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, conducted on mountain bikes ridden around southern California. The example of municipal breakdown that he chooses is Vallejo, California, where generous contracts with police and firemen turned the city to a pauper among its peers, reduced the City Manager's staff to himself and one other person, and saddled the city with debts that literally are impossible to repay. The city declared bankruptcy not long after his visit.

This is an entertaining and informative look at how it happened to these nations and how it affected them. It is a lightning fast read. (I listened to the [unabridged] audiobook version, read by actor Dylan Baker. Baker's reading is a wee bit actorly for my taste, but he is clear and, apart from an idiosyncratic pronunciation of Vallejo, kept my interest right through the book.)

by Julian Barnes

I am a Julian Barnes partisan, but there are other, better books that he has written—others more deserving of the Man Booker Prize than this one. It is short, barely 150 pages long, but hardly a novel. It is more the outline of a novel, with a few excursions into development, but it mostly remains on the surface of things and relies on significant plot points and some rather overdone symbolism to carry the weight.

In the first part of the book, Tony Webster writes of his adolescence and his friends and the arrival into their midst of Adrian Finn, a strange, but compelling presence in the school, willing to enter the lists with and even to impress their teachers. Soon the boys are at university and begin to lose touch with each other. Tony becomes involved with a girl, Veronica, who is snobbish and controlling. A central event in the novel and Tony's life is a visit he pays to Veronica's family's house one weekend. Veronica and her father seem to be laughing at Tony from their socially superior heights. Veronica's mother warns Tony, "Don't let Veronica get away with too much." This is never explained, but it remains a kernel of enigma in Tony's life.

By the end of the first part of the novel, Tony and Veronica have broken up (she sleeps with him at last, after their parting—another mystery), Tony has married, become a father, divorced his wife Margaret, and become a retiree. In the second section, a surprising legacy from Veronica's mother leads Tony to examine his past with Adrian and with Veronica. He contacts Veronica, and with persistence, eventually meets her. Veronica seems angry and distant. She refuses to explain what ever it is that she knows.

Tony pursues his exploration of the past and uncovers secrets about other and himself. He learns things about his younger self that leave him gasping in disbelief. He discovers that he has caused misery and sadness, albeit indirectly. The last few pages reveal a surprising secret that Barnes goes no way to exploring. The end proves gimmicky; no resolution, just revelation.

There is some good writing here, but the book is inconsistent and below the standard we have come to expect from Mr. Barnes.

R. K. Narayan

by Anita Brookner

Two women, both christened Elizabeth, are the main characters in this sad, bleak novel. Beth Weatherall is the narrator. It is from her that we learn about her friend from schooldays, Betsy. Both women are victims of their families and of their times. Much is made of the rise of feminism and the failure of the movement to inspire much devotion from either woman.

Neither woman seems to be able to make decisions for herself or to stand up for herself. By great good fortune neither woman ends up marrying a sadist like David Melrose (Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn), but each lives a simulacrum of a life. Beth is married to an older man, named Digby, whom she cuckolds with Edmund, a younger friend of Digby's. Beth lived in Paris before her marriage, but never lived an exciting life as she might have envisioned. Betsy lives in Paris for a time with a man who is something of a mountebank and who ends up committing suicide. Beth and Betsy reunite when Betsy returns from Paris.

Betsy, too, becomes involved with Edmund. Beth is able to see the affair develop, but doesn't see the similarities between Betsy's and her behavior. In the end the women lead rather colorless lives, which will frustrate most readers hoping for more. One wishes one could kick these Elizabeths in their respective rumps.

The novel is written entirely from Beth's point of view and her ability to go on and on about fairly little is startling. She spends long pages dissecting Betsy's motives and her lack of adjustment.

Tatjana Soli's novel is set during the Vietnam war. The protagonist is Helen, a photojournalist. Her story begins at the fall of Saigon in April, 1975 and flashes back, quickly, to her first days in Vietnam. We see her in all her naïveté and watch her as she falls ever more deeply into the thrall of the war. She has long-term relationships with an older, experience photojourno named Sam and, later, with his Vietnamese assistant (and photographer in his own right), Linh. The focus on journalists is a canny decision; journalists were essentially outsiders to the day-to-day slog of the military and had no defensiveness about the war's execution.

Helen's coming to Vietnam is a curious reversal of the events in the life of Dana Stone, a photographer who likely died in 1971 in Cambodia and whose brother, John Stone, joined the army, perhaps to see what had happened to his brother. Helen's brother died in the war in 1965, and she is drawn to this country, in part to see where her brother died, but the country takes her by surprise as it works its way into her feelings. She is soon disabused of any optimism she might have felt as she discovers how her brother died an unnecessary death because of cowardice and foolish tactics. She sees the brutality of the war, but to call this an anti-war book would be too simplistic. It is surely a story of disenchantment, not the least of which is Helen's disenchantment with her own countrymen.

The people of Vietnam, both North and South, are drawn sympathetically and are more important to this book than to many other books about this era. The author is sensitive to the culture of the Vietnamese people and makes us feel the strangeness of these ally-invaders through their eyes. She is, however, sympathetic to the American soldiers, as well, as they blunder about, befuddled by a country and an effort that they find hard to comprehend.

In the end, the book returns us to that spring of 1975 as Helen and two other journos make their way to Thailand via Cambodia. The tension builds as they enter this "Kampuchea" of the Khmer Rouge and find themselves in real danger (another parallel to Dana Stone's story). The book more than fulfills its promise. It deserves a place on that shelf of books that seek to explore the human drive to participate in war and that succeed in bringing us closer to an understanding of those impulses.

Ms. Soli has got it all exactly right. The book had me up at night thinking of my own time in Vietnam, something that I had not done in over thirty years. It is a fine book.

Written April 12, 2010 17:21

by Nathan Englander

by Gordon Mathews

I discovered this book in a review in The Economist (20 August 2011). I am happy I did. It has proved to be a fascinating and readable study of a place that, while not perhaps unique, is certainly deserving of the lavish attention that the author gives to it. Professor Mathews is an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He spent a great deal of time from 2006 to 2010 exploring the building, speaking to its denizens and distilling his findings into an ethnographic analysis that is compelling reading and has an almost narrative drive.

Chungking Mansions (CM) is a building in Hong Kong that became famed among parsimonious travelers after it appeared in the Lonely Planet guide books. It is more of an institution than a mere building, though. It is a hub of what Mathews calls "low-end" globalization. That is, traders come from Africa and South Asia to Hong Kong, with its rather liberal visa rules. They reside for a time at CM, making deals for mobile phones, clothing, and other products. Then, they return with those items to their home countries, often carrying them in their baggage. They operate on improbably narrow margins, making profits of just a few hundred dollars. The traders are covered most thoroughly, but the author explores asylum seekers, the sex trade workers, the drug addicts and the Hong Kong Chinese who populate CM and its environs.

In the first four of five major sections, Professor Mathews provides a history of the place, descriptions of the people, an analysis of the goods and their processes, and the laws that affect the denizens of this entrepôt-like structure. The fifth section is a brief look at the potential future for CM. Each section is full of color. Several detailed portraits of traders and asylum seekers are included as well. These are moving, even poignant. They raise this book above the dry and academic studies we are accustomed to.

I grew up in and I am familiar with New York City. Places like Flushing in Queens, which Mathews mentions specifically, are like entrepôts in themselves. The diversity of the people plying their trades in shops and on the streets is reminiscent of Prof. Mathews's descriptions of CM. It is a great experience to see these New Yorkers, many of them new citizens, making the system work for them. Regardless of one's opinion of the details of capitalism and globalization, it is heartening to witness such energy expended on commerce, in all its forms and avatars.

by Yishai Sarid

This novel has a great deal in common with much of John le Carré's work. A functionary in a security system becomes disaffected and his loyalties drift from systems to people. Limassol is Sarid's second novel and the first to be translated into English. It is an absorbing novel set in modern Israel and confronts face on the contradictions inherent in life in that country. It is a book that will resonate with American readers, especially as we approach the tenth anniversary of the attacks of 11 September 2001.

The protagonist, who is never named (Let's call him 'A.'), works, as nearly as I can work out, as an interrogator for Aman, the intelligence directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces. A. has had two unfortunate incidents occur during interrogations he has conducted. In the first incident, the man has died; in the second, A. has lashed out at the man with his hands, breaking his front teeth. He is, to say the least, overwrought.

His control, Haim, an educated, old-school intelligence chief has added some undercover work to his responsibilities. He is taking writing lessons with a novelist, a woman named Daphna, in order to obtain access to a known terrorist organizer, the son of one of her old friends. The old friend, Hani, is a Palestinian who has been denied entry to Israel for some years now is dying of cancer. Daphna knows she is being used in some way, but she is willing to go along, because she wants some help for her son, a drug addict whose life is quickly spiraling down to an all but certain junkie's death. 

A.'s family life is troubled. (He has the annoying habit of referring to his son as "the child". One surmises that, as a father, he is a bit distant.) His wife, Sigi, wants to take a job her firm has offered that requires her to move to New York City. A. is not willing to go immediately, but he has not firmly refused as yet. He becomes more and more estranged from his wife as his job demands require him to remain out at night and take time to work with Daphna to obtain her coöperation.

A. is now estranged from his work, his family and his work on the Daphna problem has assumed larger importance. He has made an attempt to help her son, Yotam, and is helping her friend Hani to gain entrance to Israel to see to his medical needs. Each step brings him closer to the goal of assassinating the son of Hani, who has proved elusive. The novel's climax takes place in Limassol, the Cypriot port and tourist destination, where A., Daphna and Hani travel for Hani to be able meet his son for the last time. The events in Limassol are not unexpected, but Sarid handles them deftly.

This is a thoughtful, noirish, thriller that gives us a glimpse into life in Israel, threatened from without and from within, and the pressures that this exerts on just a few of its citizens. Reading Limassol could prove illuminating for Americans, especially those who wonder how we would handle the situation that Israel faces.

The book is published by Europa Editions has all the positive aspects that this implies--interesting cover art, readable typeface and layout, as well as the cover edge folds familiar to readers of this imprint. I was, however, surprised at the inaccuracies in the cover blurb describing the plot. Perhaps, in the future, these should be written by someone who has actually read the book.

This book is by Ruth Franklin, a senior editor and literary critic at The New Republic. It was published in November, 2010 by Oxford University Press. It is on 272 pages long, but it is packed with thoughtful writing on what Ms. Franklin terms "Holocaust fiction." It confronts the issues squarely and spares the feelings of no one who thinks they are the gatekeepers of the Holocaust, whether they are survivors or are from subsequent generations. These issues are important, not only for the history of the Holocaust, but, also, for dealing with more recent massacres, such as the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

The first section of the book contains chapters on many of the best-known writers of fiction about the era or set in its time. The chapter titles resonate with their names: Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, and Imre Kertész. One of the important points the author makes is that there is no single viewpoint of this event which took place across thousands of square kilometers of the European continent, extending even beyond Europe. Using the famous Theodor Adorno quotation about poetry and Auschwitz as a point of departure she explores the resonance and the chilling effect that this quotation has had on creative approaches to fiction of the Holocaust.^† She confronts the various arguments for controlling the message, such as the use that Holocaust deniers might make of disagreements or discrepancies between writers. She even confronts the suggestion that only survivors may write of these events, a viewpoint which is especially evident in Elie Wiesel's writing and in his public statements.

Each chapter is a considered exploration of the writers and the various controversies which have swirled around them. In all cases Ms. Franklin seems to argue for an open-minded, liberal approach to the aesthetic that we bring to such writing. No Holocaust fiction can be entirely "true"; each piece of writing is a work of art, that is, it is honed and polished with a literary eye. She is generous, too, to Jerzy Kosinski, whose responses to criticisms and questions was decidedly mixed. She considers him in this section with other survivors, even though some would place him squarely in the fake class with Benjamin Wilkomirski and Carl Friedman.

The second section is entitled "Those Who Came After" and covers the best-known of the artists who are not survivors themselves: Thomas Keneally and Steven Spielberg, Wolfgang Koeppen, W. G. Sebald, and Bernhard Schlink. Her analysis of both the novel Schindler's Ark and the film Schindler's List is intriguing and explores the reality of Oskar Schindler's character, less attractive in some ways than in the screenplay, and the liberties that Spielberg took with it. She takes an open-minded view of the controversy involving Wolfgang Koeppen and his creation of a novel from the memoir of Jakob Littner. This is one of the most intriguing sections of the book and draws us deep into the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas that confront the reader in this most contentious of fields. Ms. Franklin is a proponent of the late W.G. Sebald's work and is not fond of the work of Bernhard Schlink. Her analysis of the latter's work, especially The Reader points up the questionable nature of the conclusions that she believes Schlink would like us to draw from his work.

The last chapter in this section, entitled "Identity Theft: The Second Generation", explores two areas. First is the topic of authors who misrepresent their past, such as Benjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments, and Carl Friedman, author of Nightfather. Second is the topic of children of survivors, some of whom claim the name "survivor" for themselves, because of the psychic damage done to them in growing up in their parents' households. Ms. Franklin has little patience with this derivative survivorship.

Her conclusion, a chapter entitled "The Third Generation," among whose number Ms. Franklin counts herself, covers writers such as Nathan Englander, especially his story "The Tumblers," Jonathan Safran Foer and his novel Everything is Illuminated, as well as Michael Chabon, whose work ranges from the possible, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, to the wildly imaginative, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. One of the most powerful and moving sentences in the book is found in this chapter. She believes that, in order to create "images and words with lasting power...we have to overcome our fear that 'the telling of beautiful untrue things'—Wilde's classic definition of fiction—is the same as desecration, trespass, lying: a means, even of Holocaust denial." (p. 237)

This is an important book. It forces us to confront our relationship with history, the persons who have lived through that history, and with the artists who would interpret that history. It is a complex and engrossing question, admirably served by Ms. Franklin's elegant, informative work.

^†Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch ("To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.") The quote should be understood in the context of a "highly ideological Marxist literary criticism in which the Holocaust serves as the ultimate paradigm of the intersection between culture and barbarism." (p. 2) It is understood instead, as Ms. Franklin points out, as an injunction against any creative writing about the Holocaust, which would be seen as "aestheticizing horror."

Written August 9, 2011 13:29

by Penelope Lively

Published in 2007, this novel covers some 60 years of the lives of a small family. The title comes from an old parlour game. The game is played by having participants select words to a certain recipe and combining them into a story that combines the players' submissions in odd and often humorous ways. (Think of Mad Libs; a game that I never found particularly enjoyable.) The book is poignant in spots, somewhat pat in others, but the writing is of a high order as ever.

Matt and Lorna meet in the park in London in the late 1930s. Their meeting is a coup de foudre for each of them. In a short time, they are married and living in an austere cottage in Somerset. Matt is a wood engraver and they get by on sales of his work to Lucas, publisher (and basement printer) of Heron Press. The war begins and their lives are forever changed.

The book leapfrogs over the years without apology and tells the family story down to the grandchild of Matt and Lorna. It is no spoiler to say that the plot comes full circle to a poignant, affecting end.

Penelope Lively's characters are all interesting people in their own way. Her women characters make mistakes, but are never victims--not in truth, nor in their own minds. They do not exasperate as some authors' female characters tend to do. The are never passive and, for that reason, often seem more real. There is little great conflict; much of this book examines the rubbing along together that is the stuff of domestic life.

Matt and Lorna's lives were not long, but their legacy is a touching creation from Ms. Lively's ever-satisfying imagination.

 by Alan Bennett

"The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes"

"The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson"

Bennett, it seems, never ventures far from his roots in the gray city of Leeds. He is happy to engagge the narrow English mind, especially as manifest in its older citizens. Here, he peeks behind the respectable drapery in two English households.

In the first story, Mrs. Forbes is a bit of a dragon. Her husband enjoys his Internet sex life and she controls the house, as well as her son, Graham, whose closeted gay life is, or seems to be, unknown to her. She accepts the fact the he is marrying an older, plain wman named Betty. Mrs. Forbes classist, cutting remaks notwithstanding, Betty brings a degree of normality to the life of the two men in this small family. Bennett stretches the bounds of our credulity, but give us an entertaining romp.

The second story explores the life of a widow whose relationship with ther daughter is strained by Mrs. Donaldson's participation in providing the service of role-playing patient to assist in the training of medical students a the local university. She has, more horribly, taken in lodgers, a couple, medical students named Laura and Andy. The arrangement she strikes with the latter two provides a bit of shock and, once again, pushes us even further to the edge of belief.

Bennett is a man of the theatre and in these stories explores the limits and the reach of playacting and the perception of reality. The writing is not inspired; it is even a bit wan. The stories do provide an evening's entertainment, but fail to grip us as do his plays, his Talking Heads monologues, or even his diaries. The word "unseemly" taken together with the subject matter, is meant, undoubtedly, to remind us that to Bennett, as to Terence, nothing human is alien to him.

by P. D. James

This novel revisits the principals of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice six years after the marriages that end the novel have taken place. The main characters are three couples: Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth, Charles Bingley and Jane, and George Wickham and Lydia. The events take place over several months between fall and spring.

Even before the contemporary phenomenon of fan fiction (FF or  fan-fic, as it is known), this kind of extrapolation has been done. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes has been included in many novels and short stories by others. Writers have attempted to do the same with the characters in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.

P. D. James's idea is to revisit the characters in a mystery set in 1803, at the beginning of war with Napoleon in Europe. Very quickly, the limitations of Austen's world create limitations in the potential for such a novel. Events that would be plausible in the world of Adam Dalgleish would be unacceptable to her readers' concept of Jane Austen's 19th Century. So Ms. James is caught between two poles--the plausible world, constrained by the very novel she loves, and the constraints of consistency of character that limit what these people will do. This forces her to abandon Elizabeth Bennett as the primary character, because she is limited by her role as mother and lady of the house. Only Darcy can move into the wide world, because he is a man and is found at the center of many of the events. But Elizabeth is the character that we all love. Not auspicious.

In addition, let us not forget that Jane Austen's novels, especially Pride and Prejudice, are part of a genre we might be called "uxorious husband fantasies." Such works are limited in their appeal. They work in their own space and their own time, but when we attempt to carry them outside that context, the characters immediately turn flat and cardboard. We love them in Austen, but they are merely dull in the wide world. They have no quirks of character. Each day for them is much like the other. They raise families, visit each others homes. They are, in short, pedestrian.

The book begins brilliantly with a prologue. This does nothing more than summarize the events of Pride and Prejudice, but it is a pleasure to read, and it sets a high bar for the balance of the novel. The diction and the language in this part of the book feel much like Jane Austen's. The rest of the novel, although mostly free from annoying anachronisms, sounds less and less like Jane the further into the book we read. Jane did not write "inside" people's heads, and this is the most salient difference, I think, between this novel and the original. It just feels a bit wrong to know so much about these characters' feelings and attitudes.

The book is readable, but it is not a book I would recommend. It feels too much like a gimmick, especially when the author plants references to other Austen characters in the text--the Knightley's from Emma and the Elliots from Persuasion. The "mystery" is barely warrants the term, but, beyond that, it seemed tame and unispired. By the end of the book, I felt I had wasted my time.

by Sam Lipsyte

This author's first book. Short stories (none over 14 pages) that are edgy and coruscate with amazing language and images. Many of the characters are disaffected and could, objectively, be called failures, but Lipsyte explores their inner lives as if they mattered. Some seem to matter less to themselves.

We can see in some of them the themes and the places that he explores in his novels: the first, Home Land and the most recent, The Ask. The best of them are a pleasure to read. "My Life, for Promotional Use Only" tells of a former rock musician, self-deprecating about his music, who comes to work for his friend Rosalie, whom he met after a show years before. She is "a rock star now," having grown rich selling her Web site to a tech company. She is touching base with something in her past and, eventually, sends him on his way, but he's in touch with something else. Love, maybe? In the meantime, they meet for drinks, dinner and some sex. It is the latter that seems to contain the catalyst for the exit. We are treated to a look inside this man's head. Pretty entertaining.

"Rosalie calls over the waitress and they talk for a while about somebody's new art gallery. The waitress is famous for a piece where she served Bloody Marys mixed with her menstrual blood. Word had it she overdid the tabasco.

"I wait for the moment when our waitress stops being a notorious transgressor of social mores and becomes our waitress again, look for it in her eyes, that sad blink, and order a beer." (from "My Life, for Promotional Use Only," p. 130)

"Less Tar" has another man working for a small company (an on-line magazine) struggling to succeed. Some of the characters we meet are his fellow smokers who have found a disused floor in the building that became their smoking area. He has broken up with his girlfriend, Katrine, and their story is covered a bit, too.

"Ergo, Ice Pick" is a story of a man who has taken up with some improbable rural revolutionaries living in a rented house. The narrator is more of an outsider than his compatriots, even a bit mad, and is eventually rejected by them--sent home to live with his parents. The story covers their interactions with their landlord, the local neo-Nazi bar owner, and the local college students whom they recruit. The title comes from a remark made by one of the characters, whose knowledge of the details of Leon Trotsky's death is imperfect. "Bronstein had Hitler pinned," says Martin. He knew what was coming. He figured Stalin out, too. Ergo, ice pick."

The stories are all written from the point of view of the main characters, all men. Some of the stories come off as if the narrator had taken speed and was asked to talk about himself. They have that much manic energy. Very entertaining stuff.

by Julian Barnes

This book of short stories is full of Barnes's excellent writing. From the first story, "East Wind," (a rare miss that has a whiff of research about it and is somewhat contrived) to the last and the title story, "Pulse," a moving tale of a man's life with his parents, the book rewards the reader with the quality of the writing and the pure pleasure of seeing where Barnes's imagination will take us.

Some of the best stories are Barnes's signature "historical" fiction. Barnes always manages to convey a sense of history without stuffing his stories with famous historical figures or artificially contrived events . It is more the setting and the particulars of the individuals in the tales that make them "historical." "The Limner" takes us into the life of a deaf painter living in what seems to be the 19th Century U.S., who travels from town to town in search of work, painting portraits of people and their homes. He is also taking the measure of these people and seeing them through his eyes enriches this glimpse into the past. "Harmony" is the tale of an 19th Century polymath (Franz Mesmer) who takes up the use of magnets to effect cures in functional defects of the human body. He is consulted by the parents of a daughter (Maria Theresia Paradis) who seems to have a case of hysterical blindness. It hasn't prevented her from becoming a virtuoso musician, though. The doctor's attempts to cure her blindness create difficulties for both her and him. Although not as successful as "The Limner," this story holds the reader's interest nicely.

by Dominic Lieven

This book is written by Dominic Lieven, Professor of Russian Government at the London School of Economics. He is himself a descendent of two of the principals playing a role in the history.The British subtitle is more accurate: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814, because the book covers much more than the Tolstoy novel. In fact it reminds us how much Russia and Tsar Alexander contributed to the alliance that drove Napoleon from France.

Previous histories have been heavily slanted toward the French or Prussian or Austrian sides. This book is written largely from the Russian point of view. It is well-researched and relies heavily on primary sources, especially Russian military archives and military histories. The amount of effort involved must have been prodigious. The author's style has a narrative flow that is compelling and the reader flies through the book, despite its 520+ pages.

The maps provided are of some use in following the intricate battle descriptions, but more information about the locations and movements of various forces would have been welcome. A set of plates shows portraits of many Russian participants as well as color renditions of the uniforms of various units.

The debacle that Napoleon's invasion of Russia became was caused, in great part, by a deliberate strategy of retreat and harrying that the Russian leaders, including Tsar Alexander himself, developed to respond effectively to the man generally acknowledged to be one of the finest military minds of all time. Napoleon, for all his spontaneity and effectiveness, would often become entrenched in a line of thought and fail to see the consequences of his actions. Tarrying in Moscow until the late fall of 1812 was an example of this stolid thinking.

The allies decision to pursue Napoleon across Europe to the very gates of Paris was not the obvious solution. Napoleon's military prowess enabled him to get and hold power and a military solution was the only device to prove successful in taking it away. Napoleon was notorious for signing peace agreements and ignoring them in pursuit of some more useful policy. Tsar Alexander would not settle for a short-lived peace, even though his country was economically wounded and craved respite from war. The tsar was instrumental in putting together the coalition of Prussian, Swedish, and Austrian powers that eventually forced Napoleon from his throne.

If your understanding of the late Napoleonic period is limited to War and Peace or, heaven help us, Love and Death by Woody Allen, this book will provide just the engrossing corrective that you need.

Written July 16, 2010 13:41

by Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman's contribution to the Why X Matters series from Yale University Press.

Edith Grossman is a well-known translator of Spanish verse and a memorable version of Don Quixote. She covers some of the same ground that she did in her preface to the Cervantes, but in the end has created a reasonable apologia for translation of literature as a concept.

The first chapter gives some convincing reasons for the existence of translations. We cannot possibly know all languages, so we must rely on translations if we are to have a glimpse at "other attitudes and perspectives, other ways of looking at the world." The sheer numbers of books published every year leaves us unable to read books in our own languages, so it is impossible to imagine learning Russian to read Dostoevsky, Spanish to read Cervantes, French to read Proust, etc. The reading of other literatures is important to "our sense of ourselves a serious readers."

She bemoans the reluctance of publishers to publish translated works. She complains about the reviewers who do not get it and who use words like "seamless," or "able" in their perfunctory references (if any at all) to the translator of the work they are reviewing. I do agree that it is a bit surprising to see reference to the quality of a translation in a review, when it's not clear that the reviewer has any grasp of the original language at all. This section is balanced and fairly well argued, but the controversy about translation does have the air of a Swiftian squabble.

I agree with Grossman, up to a point. That point is when Ms. Grossman quotes John Felstiner, a translator of Pablo Neruda, among others, when he says: "Verse translation at its best generates a wholly new utterance in the second language--new yet equivalent, of equal value." Self-serving, no? I think a bit more self-effacement would have been appropriate here.

The chapters on "Translating Cervantes" and "Translating Poetry" are where the valuable contribution lies. The latter section, especially, is of value in permitting us to see how a translator might approach a work and how she thinks about conveying the sense and the import to the reader. The rhythm and the rhyme schemes, of Spanish poetry are different from English. Spanish poetry is based on syllable count not on feet, as is English poetry. The number of polysyllabic words is greater in Spanish than in English, so the translator's job is a complicated alchemy of word choice, syntax and overall concept.

Ms. Grossman indirectly quotes Richard Pevear, who, with his Russian-born wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, is a translator of Russian literature. In a review of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace in The New Yorker, James Wood says: "Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, Pevear writes, but a dialogue between two languages."

I too, along with Grossman, could not imagine a world without translations of literature. It would be bleak indeed.

Written April 6, 2010 11:22

by Lou Beach

by Henning Mankell (Laurie Thompson, translator)

Kurt Wallander's appearance in this, most likely the last, Wallander novel is as dispiriting to the reader as his life is to himself. He is managing in his job, but had bouts of memory loss that he cannot explain and had given him a setback with his current commanding officer. He has become a grandfather, true, but he seems old before his time. He seems to be giving up. His daughter is living with a financial executive and it is her partner's parents who bring Wallander into the center of events.

The story centers on occurrences in the past; twenty-odd years past. The presence of what are thought to be Russian submarines in Swedish waters has been dealt with in a way that makes Håkan von Enke, Linda's partner's father very uncomfortable. This is all set out in a conversation that Håkan has with Wallander at a dinner party at the von Enke's home in Stockholm. Within a short time,both Håkan von Enke disappears and, within a few days, his wife disappears as well.

Wallander begins to investigate on his own, consulting with a Stockholm detective. The plot spins out over a short period, but Wallander must travel all over southern Sweden seeking answers to the questions that arise.

This book is political, but it is not as satisfying as his previous book with a political theme, The White Lioness. That book dealt with the politics of South Africa and its reverberations in Sweden. It was much more effective. This novel mentions many figures from Swedish politics (including Olaf Palme, the assassinated prime minister), but does so in a somewhat perfunctory way. As Cold War novels go, for this is what the book is, it has a weak plot, but the procedural and investigative aspects make it worth reading.

The book has a somewhat contrived quality, especially in the way the threads of the plot are resolved, but Wallander has become disaffected and it is this tone that makes him somewhat feckless and less sympathetic. The Swedish ambience is effective, however, and compensates for other shortcomings in the book. It is difficult to know how much of the somewhat wooden quality of the prose and the flatness of the characters can be ascribed to the translation, but this book is much less compelling than Mr. Mankell's previous efforts.

by Elaine Pagels

A thorough look at the B of R, especially useful for those of us, such as I, who have never read it, having only a vague idea of its weirdness (beasts covered in eyes, etc.). The B of R is summarized in the first section of Prof. Pagels's book. The second section covers the author, John of Patmos, and his place in the history of prophecy, beginning in the Old Testament and continuing into the other revelations that were created near the beginning of the Common Era.

More revelations, so to speak, come in the third section. Here, Pagels covers the various other revelations, including those that were found in the cache at Nag Hammadi in 1945. The point, here, is that there was no single B of R, but many. The question she hopes to answer is why this on is the only one to be incorporated into the canon of the New Testament.

The fourth section covers the reason for the writing itself. Her contention is that the B of R is an anti-Roman screed, written in coded language. Coded language was the only kind that would have been permitted in that time, because a direct attack on Rome would have brought down even greater repression on the Christians.

Later, the anti-Roman language was no longer required, was even out of place. The empire had become Christian, by the fiat of the emperor Constantine in 313 C.E. the bishop Athanasius began to use the B of R to justify the repression of outsider (heretical) thinking in the early church. Athanasius, too, was the first to list the canon of the N.T., which has come down to us unmodified from his original. He included the B or R and excluded the Apocrypha. As part of his repression of heresy, Athanasius promulgated his Easter Letter, listing the books of the canon for the first time. The Easter letter was written on the wall at the monastery at Nag Hammadi. The monks who had regard for the other books, including other revelations, hid them. They remained hidden for over 1,500 years.

Prof. Pagels has written another engrossing look at early Christianity and at the evolved construct that is Christian dogma.

by Edwin S. Hunt and James M. Murray.

by Marc Levinson

Marc Levinson, a historian and Senior Fellow for International Business at the Council for Foreign Relations, has written a history that is thorough, meticulously researched, and a pleasure to read. Everyone underestimated the impact and the directions that this innovation would lead us. Union leaders, politicians and bureaucrats, even the entrepreneurs who created the concept, got it wrong at some point or other.

Before the container, shipping internationally was slow, unpredictable, and, above all, very costly. The docks were a bottleneck because of carefully managed work rules for dockworkers, restrictive government regulations, and the sheer difficulty of loading and off-loading cargo. In the 'breakbulk' days, everything was stored in the hold and lifted in and out by crane. The time it took to load pallets or nets and set hooks simply could not be reduced. The business of shipping was burdened by centuries of tradition and protectionism.

Levinson takes us from that era to the development of the concept of containerized shipping, due in no small part to the owner of a trucking company, Malcolm McLean. He describes the changes to dockworkers lives, the consequences to ports that the container passed by, and the responses of governments and businesses to the idea of the container. As is so often the case with world-shaking change, a war played a major role in the furtherance of the container revolution.

We learn about the attempt to standardize containers for smooth movement from land to ship and back to land; how the first oil crisis of 1973 created one crisis for the container industry; how an oil glut created another crisis; and how traditional maritime companies had no special advantage in this new age. Above all, we learn how finely meshed the elements of the global economy are and how simple ideas can take a long time to be adopted, but still have a wide impact.

This fine book is much more than a micro-history of the shipping container. It is a model for books of its kind. It is also an eye-opening look at the mechanism of the world's economy.

Written June 25, 2010 16:14

by Penelope Lively

This novel is Penelope Lively's twentieth book, by my count. Dame Penelope (she received her DBE in the 2012 New Years Honours for services to literature) is a fine stylist and creates interesting characters. She often seems slightly more comfortable with women characters, but she can create rounded male characters as well. She cannot be accused of the crude manipulation of her characters that other authors indulge in. She tells their stories with omniscience, but her omniscience never feels intrusive. Her way with the subject of sex is delicate but direct--focusing more on the place of lust and love in human life than on mere mechanics.

This novel is set in contemporary London. It has a slight post-modern edge, because Ms. Lively continually calls attention to the way in which a single event has ripples throughout the lives of everyone in the book. Charlotte Rainsford, a retired teacher, is mugged and injured. She has damaged her hip and is forced to rely on her daughter, Rose, and her son-in-law Gerry to take her in until she has recovered enough mobility to return to her own home. It is this little twist to the fabric of the world that creates the events in the novel.

Rose must leave her job as personal assistant to a retired academic historian, Henry, Lord Peters to tend to her mother after her mugging. Henry is forced to ask his niece, Marion, for assistance. She travels with him to Manchester for a lecture (a disaster). Marion meets George Harrington there, and her life will change dramatically with him as a catalyst. Marion has been having an affair with Jeremy, whose wife Stella suspects nothing, until Marion errs in sending a text to Jeremy which is seen by his wife.

Charlotte has been volunteering as a reading tutor for adults. Now, living in her daughter's house, she has the idea that one of the students, Anton, a charming man from eastern Europe, come to the house for assistance. Anton comes to be a friend to Rose after several lessons with Charlotte, and Rose and he form another epicycle in this little ad hoc solar system with Charlotte at its center.

Henry is feeling low after his poor showing in Manchester and decides that a television documentary series covering aspects of the 18th Century, his specialty, is just the ticket. It is through contact with a producer that Mark comes into his life. Mark is a historian as well and manages to insert himself into the story, offering to assist Henry to organize his archive of letters, notes, and papers. Mark has an eye to the main chance, but he is not a villain.

The novel moves rapidly among these characters and their complications as they rub along together. One salient aspect is the secrets that the characters harbor. Their actions become known, but, more importantly, their secret thoughts do not. It is these glimpses into the inner lives of her characters that make Ms. Lively's prose so attractive and readable. Even the most self-involved of them is worth listening to. The young mugger, too, the cause of all this mishagas, is dealt with neatly and succinctly. This is one of Penelope Lively's most satisfying books.

by Colson Whitehead

Picture a novel that has the feel of a post-apocalyptic Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren) with the intensity of a book written over a weekend in a white heat (like a book that Harlan Ellison might have written, perhaps, as he famously did, in a bookshop window). Colson Whitehead has stepped back into a realm that he left behind with his debut novel The Intuitionist (for my money one of the best New York City novels of all time). This book is more strongly planted in the science fiction genre, though, taking as its subject a New York struggling in the aftermath of an apocalyptic plague that has turned the majority of the population of North America into the living dead. Yes, zombies.

This is no mere zombie book, however. It is a compelling piece of writing with interesting characters, a developed jargon, as we find in all echt sci-fi novels, and a rueful fatalism that seems true to life. The plot unwinds in lower Manhattan below Canal Street (the "Zone One" of the title) over a single weekend of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The events of the plague are told in retrospect by the narrator and the main character, know as Mark Spitz for reasons that are made clear eventually. Each character has his or her "Last Night" story that they tell to comrades or other temporary acquaintances. Mark Spitz goes further and has levels of sharing that he uses at deepening levels of intimacy.

Perhaps not Colson Whitehead's magnum opus, but Zone One is an entertaining, nicely crafted and sometimes poignant book. It is a bit Baroque and overwritten in places, as is his intriguing look at New York City, The Colossus of New York, but it captures both positive and negative aspects of the human spirit nicely and belies its own events by giving the reader a sense of optimism.

by Eric Metaxas

It has been a long time since I've read a book written by a Christian or other true believer. I am accustomed to reading books that take a more academic approach to their subjects. When I say "academic," I mean that they use evidence from many sources and make an attempt to be objective.

Eric Metaxas is not burdened by such constraints. His biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and anti-Nazi, is interesting to read, but his lack of objectivity is staggering. It is not merely that he accepts uncritically all of the laudatory material about Bonhoeffer that has accumulated over the years, but he also completely accepts the underlying beliefs that Bonhoeffer expresses in his writings. This makes it rough going for the non-believing or differently believing reader. There are dozens of quotes from Bonhoeffer's sermons and pastoral letters. These serve little purpose but to illuminate the pastor's firm Christian faith. It is this attempt to 'witness' and to affirm Christianity on Metaxas's part that I found most irksome. Metaxas also is rather dismissive of the "liberal" theologians of Bonhoeffer's era, such as Karl Barth. There is no attempt to explore the differences between their approaches and that of Bonhoeffer and his fellows in the Confessing Church.

If it were not for Bonhoeffer's admirable qualities as well as the paper-thin layer of historical material that Metaxas includes, the book would be worthless. As it is, it is worth the time it takes to read, because Bonhoeffer is an example of the kind of person we should all strive to be--a person who will speak out when injustice is done in the name of the state. There are always opportunities to perform such acts, even in a democracy such as ours. We are fortunate enough not to risk our lives by doing so.

The question of how we would rise to the occasion is what we must confront when we examine the life of a man like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was not a man who confronted the state directly or faced off with Nazi street fighters. His resistance took a path that was less confrontational and could in no way be considered a martyrdom. His connections made him useful to Admiral Canaris and to the Abwehr and protected him when others were beheaded or tortured to death in a very short time. Much of his opposition was in the context of speaking out against policies that affected Christian converts from Judaism, not practicing Jews. Again and again, Bonhoeffer seems to be willing to work with and negotiate with the state.

These facts in no way diminish the importance of Bonhoeffer's efforts to resist the Nazi state, but it does suggest that his life was more complex and nuanced than Metaxas is willing to admit. Metaxas is fond of pointing out that many writers since the end of World War II have mis-represented Bonhoeffer's views in order to support their own views of Christian theology. That might be true, but Metaxas has done him a similar disservice by forcing us to view him in a hagiographic mist.

Written June 2, 2010 16:19

by Nathaniel Philbrick

This is a small book. It is a series of short chapters that form mini-essays on aspects of Melville's great novel. All this is to support the contention implied in the title. For the most part, Philbrick succeeds. His musings are mostly about the contents of the novel, but they also range into the life of Melville, his family, and his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Philbrick lards his work with a generous set of quotations from the book and Melville's correspondence. These citations remind us of the Melville style and its nearly poetic achievement. Philbrick's conclusion is that this book succeeds because it is a snapshot of life as it was lived at the cusp of the crisis of slavery in the United States in the first part of the 19th Century. This not a triumph of literary criticism, but it is a highly personal and enthusiastic reading of this enduring classic. Philbrick succeeded in conveying that enthusiasm to me, at least. I've gone back to the book and have been revelling in it's rich prose and its whiff of the modern. Perhaps, this time I'll finish it.

by Olivia Manning

This book is a re-issue by New York Review Books, a publisher which does its best to rescue excellent work from undeserved obscurity. This book, first published in 1951, is, perhaps, one of those most deserving of rescue. It is a subtle, poignant coming-of-age story. The young protagonist learns much, but the reader learns something as well.

It is January, 1945. Felix Latimer's foolhardy father has died at the hands of an Iraqi mob. His mother has died of typhoid. Felix is trapped in the Middle East by the war and has arrived to take up residence with his father's adoptive sister, Miss Bohun. She has rented a house and rules over her servants and guests with the smugness of the overly religious. She is a member and a chief preacher of the "Ever-Readies," a sect that awaits the Second Coming eagerly, even keeping empty rooms set aside for the return of their savior. Miss Bohun is the engine of this enchanting novel.

The first four chapters acquaint us with Miss Bohun and the denizens of her house. Mr. Jewel, formerly of the Merchant Service, lives in the attic. Frau Leszno and her son Nikky, the dispossessed original renters of the house, who now serve as ad hoc servants. They live on in the kitchen and pantry rooms. Another servant, an Armenian woman named Maria, lives across the garden in a kind of shed. Felix also has grown fond of the Siamese cat, Faro, and has taken her for his own. Felix lives quietly, taking lessons from Mr. Posthorn, who is prepping him for school in England, going to the cinema from time to time on what little money his aunt's exorbitant rent and board will allow. These initial pages are introductory but full of incident. We come to see Miss Bohun in all her quirky glory. Felix Latimer is young and unable to see Miss Bohun for what she is, a manipulative, miserly and deeply unhappy woman. She is a woman who loves control over her domain. She is harsh and direct at all times, but not always entirely unfair, it must be said.

Not until Chapter 5 do we meet the match that Olivia Manning has created for Miss Bohun. Mr. Jewel has become ill and is hospitalized. Mrs. Ellis, a pregnant widow, has become the new occupant of Miss Bohun's room, as Miss Bohun moves up to Mr. Jewel's attic. The young woman's husband died in the tail of an R.A.F. bomber, and she, like others, is trapped in Jerusalem by the war. The storm begins to collect itself on the horizon.

Felix is taken completely by Mrs. Ellis—she is not much older than he—struck at first by her physical presence. "Felix suddenly blushed to the roots of hair and he pretended to be absorbed again by the irises." His life is changing as "now he looked at Mrs. Ellis as if he were seeing beauty for the first time" (pp 82-83). But his interest takes on a deeper dimension as he sees her interact with Miss Bohun. Felix has always taken adults at face (and full) value; he has never evaluated them in light of his own interests or feelings.

Mrs. Ellis wastes no time in showing her displeasure with Miss Bohun and her controlling ways. She always will ask the impertinent question and confronts the older woman at nearly every opportunity. Miss Bohun quickly sees the error she has made and quickly begins plotting Mrs. Ellis's departure.

Mrs. Ellis, though she seems to have no specific interest in him, begins to broaden Felix's horizons, taking him to cafés in Jerusalem, where he meets emigrés from Europe—Poles, Russians and others—including Nikky Leszno, who to Felix's surprise, he finds is quite charming and likable. He is beginning to blossom ever so slightly.

Miss Bohun's tidy arrangements begin to unravel. Felix takes a part in this, especially with respect to Mr. Jewel's situation. Mrs. Ellis rebels at Miss Bohun's constraints on her pension, declining the awful fare. The war is over and Felix is soon to return to England for school.

The climax of the novel, need I say, involves Mrs. Ellis and Miss Bohun. The end is anything but pat as Felix discovers the shades of his new world view. Ms. Manning permits a mild comeuppance for Miss Bohun, but she tempers our Schadenfreude with an ambiguity of outcome and a nuanced glimpse of Felix's maturing ego. He has discovered, among other things, that no one is perfect—not his mother, benign but childlishly naive; nor Mrs. Ellis, who has become more gravid, a bit clumsy, and, yes, rather ordinary. No one is completely right about everything. We can learn from anyone—therein lies his coming of age. This is a book to read, re-read, and re-relish.

by Sudhir Venkatesh

This book is the memoir of a Columbia University sociology professor who, when a graduate student at the University of Chicago, worked on his dissertation in sociology by hanging out at the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago—high-rise buildings that once rose high into the sky between the Dan Ryan Expressway and Lake Michigan.

Venkatesh got to know J.T., a gang leader in one of the buildings. He was a member of the Black Kings (names have been changed as one might expect). He was drawn in by J.T.'s undeniable charm. After hanging with J.T. for a long while, he branched out and came to know the women of the place, the homeless, the drug addicts, and the people who worked in the underground economy. He met, among others, Clarisse, a prostitute; Ms. Bailey, a tenant officer with severe conflicts of interests; and Ms. Bea, J.T.'s mother.

He saw the effect of the gang on the life of the building. Though often benign, the gang was, at root, a sophisticated criminal organization. Venkatesh saw the violent and merciless side of this work, as well. He gained a great deal of knowledge of the underground economics of the projects—money laundering, tradesmen fixing cars in parking lots, others fixing appliances or hooking up illegal cable or electricity.

There was corruption in every direction—even many tenants tried to take each other for a buck. One woman sold candy in her apartment . She had to keep her possessions out of sight to avoid theft. Some did make efforts to ameliorate the situation for the sick, the old or for single mothers. Many in the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) were corrupt as were some of the police. The CHA and the police are like voices heard off. Much mentioned, rarely seen, and never consulted, except in desperation. Even the Boys and Girls Club was off-limits to children from J.T.'s building, because it could only be reached by crossing gang boundaries.

Life in RTH did have a sense of community, even when circumstances militated against it. The desperate poverty is portrayed sympathetically, but honestly. Venkatesh lived a double life—being something of a hanger-on, always thinking about avoiding involvement in crime (a violation of the ethics of his profession and a danger to himself). He even gained enough trust to begin to attend higher-level meetings of the gang at various leaders' houses in the suburbs.

Even at the end, the people of RTH are victimized by the CHA. Very few people were relocated to places that weren't just as desolate and dangerous as the place they left behind.

From the outset, everything about these projects was a bad idea. The hallways were on the exterior of the buildings. These galleries were exposed to the elements and proved a danger to several children, who fell to their deaths in the early days. This necessitated fencing to be added to them, making them more like cages than civilized living spaces. Stairs smelled of urine; some parents encouraged their children to pee in the stairways to put off the prostitutes who would otherwise hang out in them. It would never occur to someone from outside that the smell might be a deliberate deterrent.

Many more characters and events fill this intriguing book. Professor Venkatesh is honest about his naïveté and, perhaps, a bit self-serving in his narrative, but the book is compelling.