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What I Read in October 2009

I have posts on all the books I completed this month:

William Cronon, Changes in the Land - it does change, and Cronon explains how New England’s current landscape got that way.

Anton Chekhov, Four Plays – the thing is, see them if you can.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive – an entertaining series, but the author is beginning to repeat himself.

Shaffer and Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – the best novel in letters I have read since 84, Charing Cross Road.

Homer, The Odyssey – We did this as a class – the best way, because of the discussions.

John Updike, Rabbit at Rest - both Updike and Rabbit are now at rest.

Tom McHugh, The Time of the Buffalo – all about Bison Bison.

The Time of the Buffalo

I am still on the trail of Bison bison, and Tom McHugh’s The Time of the Buffalo has been an important trail guide. If you remember the Disney film The Vanishing Prairie with its buffalo and prairie dogs, then you have seen the work of Tom McHugh, as he was the principal photographer.

The Time of the Buffalo is not a picture book, although it has some neat pictures.

It is a survey of all that we know about Bison bison, its natural history and its human history, that is, the history of its interactions with us. After professional hide hunters almost exterminated the animal in the 1870s and 1880s, a few devoted naturalists managed to save a remnant herd from which today’s buffalo population descends.  Writing in 1972, McHugh says

Such losses cannot be redeemed later; once an animal is gone from the earth, it is gone forever. In an effort to save the threatened species, a few men are working to undo the errors of the many. They are engaged in a fierce struggle against our culture’s reckless disregard for rare widlife, primitive peoples, and irreplaceable timberlands, marshes, seashores, and other domains.

The buffalo flourishes now, not by accident, but as a result of dedicated effort. Other species have not been so fortunate. McHugh give us a warning, but he also gives us hope.

John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit Angstrom and John Updike and I are all of an age, born in the early years of the depression, attended public school during World War, took on family responsibilities in the 1950s and 1960s. John Updike died earlier this year and, before he did, he killed off Rabbit in his last of his Rabbit tetrology, Rabbit at Rest. They are gone, and I am still here.

Updike states a writer’s hope for remembrance in one of his late poems which the Times reprinted at the time  of this death: Requiem. As he says, whatever our puny achievements and concerns, “death is real, and dark, and huge.” It is dark and huge for Rabbit, but never entirely real.

Rabbit at Rest, like the other Rabbit books, seems to be a book about sex, but I read it as a book about life and death. Life — like sex– is temporary, real only for Rabbit while he is experiencing it. And that’s Updike’s great gift to the reader, Rabbit’s sensual experience of things.

“A couple won’t kill me,” he reassures her, and to be polite takes a few macadamia nuts into his fingers. Nuggets, they are like small lightweight nuggets with a fur of ssalt. He especially loves the way, when he holds one in his mouth a few seconds and then gently works it between his crowned molars, it breaks into halves, the surface of the fissure as smooth to the tongue as glass, as baby skin.

The surface of life is often trivial: TV surfing, baseball scores, the colors of a woman’s hair. Rabbit’s experience of this surface, this life, is intensely in the present. All of the Rabbit novels are written in the present tense, as Rabbit lives from moment to moment. He lives, he feels, but he doesn’t love very much and in the end he is tired and ready to rest.

Library Book Sale – Fall 2009

I haven’t yet read most of the books from the last sale, still, I do so little shopping these days (groceries, mostly) that I look forward to the semi-annual browse and buy at the Friends of the Library sale.

Mysteries for family reading:

Lyn Hamilton, The Orkney Scroll – we need to try a new writer from time to time, and I like historical mysteries
John Mortimer, Quite Honestly – can I have missed this Mortimer!
Helen MacInnes, Prelude to Terror - picking up on the traditional British thriller
Laura Lippman, Life Sentences – Baltimore criminals beware, although this is not one of the Tess Monaghan series
Nevada Barr, Winter Study – our favorite park ranger/detective hangs out in the snow

Miscellaneous non fiction, reflecting a variety of interests:

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz – a memoir I have not seen before
Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology – I got started with Campbell at the last sale (see my posts on The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
Kazin, A Walker in the City – I have previously read excerpts
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas – political commentary, and I may be burned out on that
Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life – read another de Botton lately on philosophy
Frederick Drimmer, The Elephant Man - the book on which the play and movie are based

Novels:

Nicolai Gogl, Dead Souls – I’ve been looking for this ever since reading Lahiri’s The Namesake
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain – one of those books I should read, like The Odyssey and War and Peace

Anita Shreve, A Wedding in December

All these for $20 in support of a good cause.

My Odyssey

I have just completed Homer’s Odyssey in a prose translation by Rieu and Rieu. How could I reach such an advanced age without having read it? Yes, I did know the story, but that’s not the same thing at all. Like knowing the plot of Hamlet without ever reading or seeing the play.

About 30 years ago I stumbled through the Iliad. I didn’t like the Iliad very much: too many gods, too much blood and mayhem, too many petty quarrels over booty. There’s plenty of blood and booty in the Odyssey also, with many appearances by Athena of the bright eyes in various guises, but the feeling I have for it is entirely different.

Odysseus is a true Greek hero, brave but full of flaws. He looks for more booty instead of going straight home to wife and child. He enters the Cyclops cave without an invitation and eats his cheese, no less. Not satisfied to get away after losing several of his men, he has to taunt the blinded giant who is then almost able to sink his boat. We constantly hear that Odysseus is resourceful, clever, cunning. He is all these things, but he is also curious, hot headed and more than a little greedy. Again, while sitting in disguise among the riotous suiters of his wife Penelope, he almost blows the whole thing by provoking a fight. He is no gentle soul. When the old nurse recognizes him, he grips her by the throat:

I am indeed home after twenty years of grief and touble. But, since a god has revealed it to you, keep your moth shut and let not a soul in the house learn the truth. Otherwise I tell you plainly — and you know I make no idle threats — that if the gods deliver these fine Suitors into my hands I won’t spare you, though you’re my own nurse, on the day when I put the rest of the maids in my palace to death.

In the Odyssey, we travel in a different time, a time recorded by Homer over 2500 years ago but set in  an even earlier age. Men are violent, seeking food, women and treasure. They also seek adventure. They want to see the world. They know they are not perfect, yet they glory in such strength as they have and fear death. They are us, or we are them, but the focus shifts slightly, sometimes clear and sometimes fuzzy. Still, I think we can imagine them more clearly than they could have imagined us.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Let’s go to Guernsey. I remember when we were in St. Malo we saw day trips advertised to the Channel Islands, but we were in France, so why go to England. Now that I have read the Literary Society novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, I know that was a missed opportunity.

I could say a lot of good things about this book, but others have already done that. It put me strongly in mind of Helen Hanfft’s 84, Charing Cross Road, and you can’t say better than that.

The Guernsey Islanders and their book discussions also put me in mind of my own book groups. I belong to two and, for a while, participated in a third, Internet group. That one started out strong, but after a few months I dropped it because only a few of us were doing the reading and had anything to say. My two local groups have endured.

First Tuesday meets the first Tuesday of every month, except when the first Tuesday doesn’t work and then we meet on the second Tuesday or the first Friday, but don’t change our name. We spend too much time haggling about which books to read next, but the haggling is kind of fun and you really get to know people that way. We try to stay away from gossip and chit chat, but are free to reminisce about personal events suggested by the book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn evoked a lot of memories of growing up in the various boroughs of New York. Also, I owe the group big time for introducing me to Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and Peter Balakin’s The Black Dog of Fate, two books I never would have tried on my own.

Ex Libris meets every two weeks, but takes July and August off, as well as the four weeks around the winter holidays. We have a nomination and election process once a year and set up the schedule for the year ahead. I like this approach because it gives me time to try to mooch the books or find them on eBay. We go for the classics and tackle some big books like Bleak House and Anna Karenina by breaking them into two or three sessions. We seem to lean toward English, French and Russian 19th century writers — Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy — so next year we are going have affirmative action for some writers from others parts of the world and some post WWII authors. My nominations are Kafka on the Shore (Japan) andDon DeLillo’s White Noise.

I like the way I read when I know I will be discussing the book with others. Posting to this blog has a similar effect, but could never replace the face-to-face fun we have in the groups.

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

The Good Husband in this addition to Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series is Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, husband to Mma Ramotswe, owner and chief detective of the agency. She has help, from her sturdy assistant — now Associate Detective — Mma Makutsi and the Good Husband himself. I read one of McCall Smith’s books when I want to give myself a boost, to remind myself that good people exist and that life continues on, with abundant good experiences for most of us. You may be perplexed and frustrated, but you are rarely totally miserable.

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

If you looked at snapshots made in New England in 1600 and again in 1800 you would see two very different places. The dominant woodlands with scattered clearings for Indian villages and corn fields are replaced by orderly, fenced plots of land. Most of the animals have left, especially the deer, moose, wolves and beavers. The Indians who once roved over large territories to follow those animals are now gone, or settled onto low-yielding agricultural lands. The departed animals were not owned and roamed free until someone killed them. They are replaced by horses, cattle and pigs who are private property and stay put — at least their owners do not intend them to roam.

In William Cronon’s careful and readable description we learn how the land changed, as well as why the Indians’ style of living and that of the colonists could not long coexist. The English settlers had commercial requirements and different concepts of the meaning and ownership of the land. As the Indians adjusted to these changes, their use of the land also changed.

When you walk the New England woods today, you do not see the woods the Indians knew, but a second growth, which developed after the settlers abandoned their pastures and cultivated fields. Find the evidence of stone fences snaking through the trees and stumble into old cellar holes. What we experience now is not what always was, in 1600 or 1800. The trees have come back and the animals are following.

Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

I saw the play 35 years ago, at The Roundabout I think. I read the play last week. Still not sure about it, I have just seen it again in a 1975 Williamstown Festival production (Frank Langella, Blythe Danner, Olympia Dukakis, all looking amazingly young) originally shown on PBS and now available through Netflix.

Gloriously alive in the picture here, that seagull is mostly dead in the play. So is it a magnificent symbol of life and death, or is it just a bird with some bad luck? Are the people symbols? Dorn is a doctor and Chekhov is a doctor. Dorn is medically ineffectual. Constantine is an aspiring playwright, and this is Chekhov’s first play. Constantine’s play sounds like pretentious nonsense — It is cold, cold, cold. Empty, empty, empty. — but he doesn’t intend it that way. Trigorin is a story writer and Chekhov is a story writer. Trigorin’s stories are created by formula, but he is successful because of it. Finally the play has an established actress and an aspiring actress. Chekhov married an actress.

Chekhov must be in here somewhere, but it doesn’t matter. Even if the play were written by the prolific Anonymous, it would still speak to us. Russians are bored in the country when they would rather be in town, if they could afford it. Russians are unhappy with their lives. Russians love, but their love is not returned. Russians lack opportunity for change. Change when it comes is often disastrous, as when Nina runs away from home to her general ruination.

The bird is dead. It lived a short time and those who should have admired and protected it shot it and stuffed it. It is not a symbol to be thought about, but one to be felt, to be pitied.

What I Read in September 2009

I finished the following in September:

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

R. C. Zaehner, Hinduism

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Margaret Drabble, The Seven Sisters

All have been noted in previous posts. The list is short, but three of the four books were demanding (guess which). Now I’m immersed in Homer’s Odyssey and plays by Chekhov. Stay tuned.