My posts are mostly about books and reading.
For my courses and some family history, see Pages.

P. D. James, The Private Patient

A friend of mine once said that she always went back to Agatha Christie when she wanted a reliable read: an intricate puzzle, neatly solved. I have similar feelings for P.D. James: an intricate puzzle, a neat solution, plus interesting people and places.

This is the latest in the Adam Dalgliesh series. Is it the last? Dalgliesh is weary with murder and ready to start a new life with Emma. Before that new life, however, we must have the puzzle. It is the classic great house format. A disparate group of people are isolated together and one is murdered. Any of them could have done it. Patiently, Dalgliesh and his team unwind the tangled threads of each person’s past. It is satisfying that a knot or two remain. The private patient, though deceased, is still private in her intentions. Life goes on.

Instead of facing the altar with his back to his bride, Adam had turned and, smiling, had held out his hand.

The Bridge on the Drina

Ivo Andric was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1961 because of this book.

In recent weeks I have read books by three Nobel winners who did not write in English: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Double by José Saramago and now The Bridge on the Drina. It’s a big world out there, even if I have to experience it in translation.

The Drina is a river in Bosnia, a tributary of the Danube, and on the border  between Bosnia and Serbia. The Bosnian town of Višegrad on the Drina, where  Andric grew up in the 1890s and early years of the 20th century, was the site of a  bridge. This stone bridge, with it beautiful 11 stone arches, was built by a Turkish Grand Vezir in during the 17th century and destroyed in 1914. For over 350 years it was the heart of the town, linking the two sides of the river and providing a meeting place for the local people.

When experts try to describe the ethnic and religious mix of the people of the Balkans, I always hear the word complex. It was and is complex. Andric uses the story of the bridge to tell the story of Bosnia’s diversity. Some of the people are good and some are bad, but as individuals, not as groups. His most sympathetic characters are those who resist using violence to settle ethnic conflict. Here, an ardent nationalist guerrilla argues with the local Muslim teacher, the hodja.

In the end, completely beside himself, [the nationalist] replied with scarcely concealed disdain to every question of the hodja: ‘The time has come to die’, ‘We will lay down our lives’, ‘We shall all die to the last man’.

‘But,’ broke in the hodja, ‘I understood that you wanted to drive the Schwabes out of Bosnie and that was the reason why you were collecting us. If it is only a question of dying, then we too know how to die, Effendi, even without assistance. There is northing easier than do die.”

The futility of all the politics and wars and rebellions is represented by the destruction of the bridge as  Europe goes mad for war in 1914.

José Saramago, The Double

If you found that you had a “double”, another person identical to you — same features, voice, scars, even fingerprints — how would you react? In The Double, José Saramago explores this situation. A history teacher learns that an actor who takes bit parts in movies is his double, and not as a part he is acting, but all the time.

This is is my first Saramago book, and it was tedious going. When an 18-page chapter is one long, single paragraph, I ask myself why a writer expects me to persevere. Within this unbroken text dialogue is telescoped together, making each exchange a puzzle exercise. The actor and his wife are having a quarrel:

If I were you, I would tear it up and throw it away or burn it, after all, dead dogs don’t bite, It’s hardly a matter of life or death, Besides, I don’t think the beard would suit you. This is no  joke, It was just a manner of speaking, all I know is that it unsettles my mind, it even troubles my body to know that there is a man in this city who looks like you….

And so on. Capitalization and commas are as in the original.

Saramago is an omniscient author, who knows all and tells all. He enters into each character’s thoughts thoroughly, often mixing speculation with narrative.

However, the privilege we enjoy of knowing everything that is going to happen up until the very last page of this story, apart from those things that might still need to be invented, allows us to say that tomorrow, the actor Daniel Santa-Clara will make a phone call to Maria da Paz’s apartment, purely to find out if anyone is there, we are, don’t forget, in high summer, the holiday period, but he will not say a word, not a single sound will issue from his lips, total silence, lest there should be any confusion, on the part of the person at the other end, between his voice and that of Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, for in that case, he would probably have no option but to pretend, to assume his identity, with, bearing in mind the current state of affairs,entirely unforeseeable consequences.

That, in case you did not notice, was one sentence. The phone call has not happened yet, but it will happen and, when it happens it may be this way or may be that way because now we are only speculating about it and it hasn’t actually happened yet. My own emotional involvement in this remains just as cool as Saramago’s  prose.

Some of Saramago’s asides are really quite wonderful:

He [the dog] will return to Tertuliano Maximo Afonso’s bedroom at first light to check that nothing has moved on this side of the earth either, for what dogs most want in life is for no one to go away.

The plot is relatively simple, the number of character is manageable, and the ending is disappointing. Saramago employs one of fiction’s tiredest devices by unexpectedly killing off key characters, followed by deja vu all over again.

It is hard to judge an ambitious novel like The Double in translation. Enough of the verbal agility comes through in the English to suggest that the Portuguese text must be very rewarding. I call the novel ambitious because that can be the only justification for the unnecessary difficulties imposed on the reader. This author is saying, Look, what I have to say is important, That important? Yes, and by making  you exert yourself to jump through my stylistic hoops, hoops that I alone cam impose and through which you alone can jump, you earn the rewards of enjoying my insights and appreciating my cleverness.

What I Read in January 2010

Two weeks away from my computer gave me lots of time to read. I have posted comments on all of these books except A Study in Scarlet, a Sherlock Holmes re-read.

Fay Weldon, Trouble
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess
John D. MacDonald, The Lonely Silver Rain
Lyn Hamilton, The African Quest
Elizabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons
G. K. Chesterton, Favorite Father Brown Stories
Tom Brokaw, A Long Way from Home
Nevada Barr, Winter Study
Kirin Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Bariel Garcia Maquéz, Love in the Time of Cholera
Irmgard A. Hunt, On Hitler’s Mountain
Sue Grafton, T Is for Trespass
Anne Cherian, The Good Indian Wife
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Two Memoirs: Bavaria and South Dakota

In 1934 Irmgard (Paul) Hunt was born in Berchtesgaden. Bavaria. In 1940, Tom Brokaw was born in South Dakota. Each has written  a memoir about growing up in different cultures at overlapping times.

In A Long Way from Home, subtitled “Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties”, journalist and TV anchor Tom Brokaw recalls life in a working class family during the war years and the increasingly-prosperous 1950s. In his acknowledgments, he quotes his mother’s reactions to the manuscript:

In some parts your ego is showing, but mostly it’s fine.

Smart mother. The parts of the book I enjoyed most were the early chapters, the story of the Conley and Brokaw families, seeking their fortunes in the cheap lands of the Dakotas and improvising to get through the Depression. Brokaw is insistent that his values and respect for hard work and working people come from this background.

One of the nicest things I know about Brokaw he does not mention in his book. When Greg Mortenson (the school builder of Three Cups of Tea) tried to raise money for his first school, he sent letters to many prominent people Only Brokaw responded with a check.

When Irmgard Hunt (neé Paul) was born in 1934, Hitler had just come to power. Her parents and most (but not all) of the extended Paul and Pohlmann families saw in Adolf Hitler a strong man who would lead Germany out of decades of trouble into better times. Hunt’s memoir, On Hitler’s Mountain, also has a subtitle: “Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood.”

This is not a Holocaust memoir. In this corner of rural and tourist Bavaria, she grew up not knowing any Jews.

However, lack of direct encounter with Jewish Germans did not mean that I did not absorb the general atmosphere of anti-Semitism and the contempt in which Jews were held, no matter how German they knew themselves to be.

On a visit to grandparents in Selb, one of the neighbors loaned Irmgard a book.

It was a children’s book with page after page showing the physical differences between Jews and Germans in grotesque drawing of “Jewish” noses, kips and eyes…. I was horrified by the crimes the Jewish people were being accused of…. Mutti asked me to return the book and not to believe all it said. Our family disputes always focused on Hitler’s war and what it would do to Germany and not on the fate of Jews.

Hunt weaves the story of her childhood, with its normal preoccupations with family , friends, playtime, school, and — during the war years — finding enough to eat, with threads of the Nazi indoctrination and control which were the reality of the time. For example, she goes through the cycle of yearly holidays — Christmas, Easter and the others — and tells how the regime modified traditional custom to promote Nazi values. Living on Hitler’s Mountain, Hunt’s family saw the Nazi bigwigs come and go to Hitler’s retreat. Albert Speer’s son was a classmate. As soon as she was old enough she joined the Hitler Youth, wanting to participate in their many activities.

After living through the last painful years of the war and the privations of the early occupation years,  Bavarians wanted to turn away from that period. Whereas Brokaw looks back with pride at the wartime sacrifices and postwar good times, Hunt had a shadowed childhood. She conveys the other side of someone else’s victory and concludes:

The Nazi years have left their mark on all who lived through them regardless which side they were on and how they came to terms with that past. Part of my Nazi legacy was that for the longest time I felt instructively scared of authority figures…. On the other hand I had resolved that what would took place under Hitler could not be allowed ever to happen again.

India India India

Still posting from my vacation reading — three books from and about India.

Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons.

Bumiller spent several years of living and working in India, and used her time there to travel and meet a great variety of Indian women. “May you be the mother of a hundred sons” is a traditional wedding wish and reflects the deference given to a woman who produces sons — and the lack of it when she does not. Bumiller was appalled by the poverty of India, the injustices of the caste system and much about the treatment of women, but she also came close enough to the real people to see the difficulties of change in a culture of rigid customs and limited resources.

I already had great respect for Bumiller after reading The Secrets of Mariko in which she documented the busy life of a Japanese housewife. I wish she would update her observations of India, made over 20 years ago. Has anything changed?

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss.

This novel, winner of the Mann Booker prize in 2006, is rather difficult to get into, as you sort out the various people and places. Hold on. The writing is good — carefully controlled, while evocative of place and character. Small matters, for example, the tin trunks marked “Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver” and “Miss S. Mistry, S. Augustine’s Convent” will return  with greater meaning as the context develops.

The story has two settings: northeastern India near the border with Nepal and New York City, where the son of the cook lives as an illegal immigrant, unable to fulfill his dreams or anyone else’s. The two stories run parallel, but finally merge.

This is a sad book, sad in its setting and sad in the events in these people’s lives, but especially sad as we gradually recognize the dark undercurrents of life. The retired judge who currently shelters his granddaughter once abused his wife, and he still shows more affection for his dog than for the girl. The cook’s son learns to dodge all the relatives and villagers who ask for his help in a situation where he can barely keep himself going. Sad.

Ann Cherian, A Good Indian Wife.

Cherian’s novel about an American-trained Indian doctor and his arranged-marriage bride is a combination of soap opera and social comedy. Nevertheless, the themes of the roles available to Indian women and the difficulties making a life in America are the same themes found in the Bumiller and Desai books, only treated more lightly.

It is easy to relate to Leila who, after several rejections by suitors, accepts the doctor — she has little choice and neither has he. It is not so easy to respect the doctor who marries while planning to dump his wife as soon as possible. What happens? Tune in tomorrow for the next episode.

Love in the Time of Cholera

I don’t do reviews in Silver Threads. I do comments. I respond to an author’s ideas or make a comparison or react to an emotional tone. Thank heaven for this self-imposed restriction, because I could never attempt a complete review of this novel — it has so many layers of meaning and is just that good.

A general observation, however. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a story teller. Like Dickens or Tolstoy, he takes you into a world he has created and displays  the people there. You don’t want to leave. Some call his work “magic realism.” The magic is that it is all very real while it is happening; it is just happens to be happening in a book.

I want to follow one thread of the story: why does Marquez begin the novel with a suicide? The opening sentence….

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

The suicide, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, is a refugee, haunted by memory and determined not to grow old.

…Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had sighed: “I will never be old.” She interpreted this as a heroic determination to struggle without quarter against the ravages of time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life when he was sixty years old.

This rejection of old age is in contrast to Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, both of whom in the course of the novel live to be very old indeed, old enough to pursue the love that eluded them with they were younger. Love in the Time of Cholera is a fictional meditation on love in all its forms, in and out of marriage, in and out of bed.

Love changes. After a four-year courtship, the young Fermina rejects Floretino:

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

Tough words, and she means them. For fifty years they separately pursue two different paths of love, she in a marriage and he by many secret affairs. Both approaches have their ups and downs, good days and bad days. Eventually Fermina’s husband dies and Florentino seeks her again, but as an old man courting an old woman.

Florentino Ariza shuddered: as she herself had said, she had the sour smell of old age. Still, as he walked to his cabin, …he consoled himself with the thought that he must give off the same odor, except his was four years older, and she must have detected it on him, with the same emotion. It was the smell of human fermentation, which he had perceived in his oldest lovers and they had detected in him.

I have given you the beginning and the almost-end. Everything in between is life — various, sometimes predictable and sometimes not, occasionally sad, and often funny. Fermina rejected an early love as an illusion. A sixty-year-old suicide rejected the continuance of love as one grows old. Fermina and Florentino show us other possibilities. Their love is enhanced by the years of life that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour rejected.

Mysteries on Vacation

Just back from a two-week break from cold weather. Absent local responsibilities, I had a lot of time to read, including catching up with some of my favorite mystery writers. (The picture above has nothing to do with the mysteries, the covers of which I could not scan before giving them away, but with the vacation.)

John D. MacDonald. When I go to Florida, I like to take along a Travis McGee mystery because MacDonald does Florida so well. The Lonely Silver Rain is the last in the series, and it has that feeling. McGee, that resourceful boat bum, feels he is aging. He finds the missing yacht, uncovers malodorous crimes and discovers he has an unknown daughter.

Lyn Hamilton. In The Africa Quest, antique dealer Lara McClintoch takes a tour group to Tunisia. Hamilton does Tunisia – both archaeological and contemporary very well – but the mystery was too complex for me. Too many crimes, too many perpetrators, too many motives. Great background, though. I like a mystery that has both a puzzle and an interesting setting.

Nevada Barr. In Winter Study, national parks ranger Anna Pigeon explores a very interesting setting indeed. Without her newly-acquired husband, she goes to Isle Royale in mid winter to participate in a long running study of the local wolf packs. It is cold, cold, cold, but the environmental science and the local jealousies keep you warm.

Sue Grafton. We are up to the letter T now. T is for Trespass is much better than the S book which preceded it. That one was too improbable for me. The themes this time are identify theft and elder abuse, and they play out in Kinsey Millhone’s familiar environment of Santa Theresa friends and connections.

G. K. Chesterton. Six stories from Chesterton’s volumes of Father Brown stories have been reprinted in Favorite Father Brown Stories, so I gave them a try. I found them imitative of Sherlock Holmes, but not as much fun. Father Brown is observant, he is clever, and he solves problems with the flimsiest of clues. I don’t think I’ll continue on, but when Sue Grafton’s and Nevada Barr’s next efforts become available, I’m up for them.

Portrait of a Priestess

The subtitle of Joan Breton Connelly’s book is Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. I started reading for the pictures, but stayed to hear what Connelly had to say.

The conventional view of women in classical Greece has been that they could barely be seen, and never heard. Penelope could weep and weave while Odysseus was away, but had no autonomous power. The scholars are now adjusting that picture, for example, pointing out that the women of Sparta ran the economic show at home when their men went off to war. Connelly turns her attention to the roles women played in the various religious cults and concludes that they were frequently seen and heard and were even sometimes powerful.

Polytheistic religions – like the cults devoted to Athena, Hera, Appollo and Dionysius – offered equal opportunities to the sexes to participate in and direct the worship activities. Some performed temporary functions, like forming part of processions. Think of the Parthenon frieze, with the youths and maidens marching along. Others were dedicated to taking care of the temples and cult objects, a sort of religious housekeeping. Connelly does not depend only on those ancient texts which have been preserved for us.

The archaeological evidence bears witness to realities not recorded in the literary texts that have shaped our understanding of ancient women. The Greek Texts come down to us, not only through the accident of survival, but also through a selection process made by later scribes and librarians…. The lesson here is all existing evidence must be considered….”

Evidence includes statues, inscriptions on statue bases, grave steles, paintings on ceramics. The world they portray is richer and more diverse than the classic texts imply. Further, of course, centuries of western commentators have looked at Greek polytheism through the window of Christianity. A priest is male, therefore, priests in ancient Greece were male and the roles played by women must have been something else or under the direction of the men.

I shall look at Greek vase painting with new respect, now that I have seen the depth of analysis, Connelly brings to her examples.

Here, a woman stands before the altar, facing Athena or her cult statue. She waves the branches of lustration to prepare for the ritual. Behind her, men have brought the animal for sacrifice, but the priestess is the central figure in the drama and controls the ritual.