What I Read in July 2010

No individual posts on the following books:

Alexander McCall Smith, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built – a good vacation read. This is one of the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency series.

Ann B.  Ross, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind – a southern widow, Miss Julia, emerges from 40 years of suppression by her know-it-all husband. The plot strained credulity, especially Miss Julia’s naive reactions to male machinations, but it was a welcome vacation read. I loved the scene where the black maid, Miss Lillian, breaks into a televangelist program by waving $100 bills supplied by Miss Julia.

Sue Grafton, U Is for Undertow. I have enjoyed this series with private investigator Kinsey Milhone, who lives and works in Santa Theresa/Barbara, California. The plotting in this one had more appeal than the last two, with one unsettling discrepancy at the end.

See my posts for more about the following books:

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key

Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool

Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book – I read this along with Ulysses.

James Joyce, Ulysses – finished at last, free at last! I have posted on my approach to reading the book and on the Circe section. Expect one more comment.

Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool

In one of Paul Newman’s last movies, Nobody’s Fool, he played Sully, a sixtyish handyman living a detached life in a small town in upstate New York. Richard Russo’s novel on which the movie was based preceded his better-known Empire Falls, but these are the same sort of people in the same sort of place.

If you met Sully in a bar, he would make little attempt to be agreeable and might be drinking a bit too much, and you would be somewhat put off by him. But if you knew him most of his life, as Miss Beryl, his former eighth grade teacher did, like her you might feel a deep affection for him.

It is rather hard to explain how Sully grows on you, but he does. He has no “front,” no need to impress you. Richard Russo’s writing grows on you too. He recognizes the flow of real work, work that has nothing to with status or a career or the good of mankind.

Carl Roebuck wondered how Sully could stand to work with Rub, but in truth, Rub was one of the few people he’d ever been able to work with. Rub was the perfect dance partner, always content to let Sully, or whoever he was working with, lead. The beauty of Rub was that he had no agenda of his own. If Sully was in a hurry or had somewhere to go, another job to do when this one was finished, hauling ass was fine with Rub. If for some reason — like they were being paid by the hour — they needed to go slow, then Rub was even more of a marvel the way he ws able to stay in motion without accomplishing anything.

The humanity of this book, which follows the life of an ordinary, unambitious man in such a way that we understand and like him, will be with me for a long time.

Circe, by Homer, by Joyce

When Odysseus landed on the Aeaean Island he was unsure how dangerous the inhabitants would be. He sent half the crew to check it out, and they were turned by the goddess Circe into swine – with the exception of one man who escaped and returned to tell Odysseus. Circe is attractive:

…But still
they paused at her doors, the nymph with lovely braids

Circe—and deep inside they heard her singing, lifting
her spellbinding voice as she glided back and forth
at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web
a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave.

The Odyssey, Book 10, Robert Fagles Translation

With the help of the god Hermes, Odysseus resists Circe’s drugged wine and gets her to free his crew from their animal forms. Then there is bathing and feasting and going to bed and the goal of Ithaca is forgotten for a year. When Circe sends him on his way, she instructs him to visit Hades to consult the seer Tiresias.

I am reading/struggling through James Joyce’s Ulysses and wonder what the long Circe section there has to do with Homer’s Circe. Joyce has written in dramatic form, with indicated speakers and with stage directions, so the externals of who is saying this or doing that are clearer than in some of the preceding sections. Yet it reads like an extended dream sequence in which all the themes take their turn on the stage.

I am looking for Circe and find an assortment of prostitutes, as well as references to all the women previously encountered. My candidate is Bella/Bello who does indeed work changes in form, both on herself and on Leopold Bloom. Bella becomes Bello and assumes the masculine pronoun. Bloom remains Bloom but is now a female, doing Bello’s bidding. Blamires’ comment:

Thus, before the powerful figure of Bella, the latent femininity and submissiveness of Bloom emerge…. Bloom, with dulling eyes and thickening nose, becomes a humble infatuated creature, while Bella fully takes over the masculine role, becomes ‘Bello’, and orders Bloom down on all fours.

Joyce performs a switch on Homer’s story. Ulysses here, rather than avoiding enchantment and taking control of the situation, is overwhelmed and transformed in ways (feminine) that Joyce perceives as negative. Is that what powerful women do? They make you into the female they no longer are, submissive, groveling, animal like.

More, the entire Circe section is one transformation after another as characters ranging from Milly Bloom to King Edward come and go in Bloom’s disordered mind. What I do not find here is the gift of the Odyssey — the knowledge that enchantment has pleasures but also dangers. Joyce’s Ulysses experiences the dangers, but where is the joy?

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key

This book evoked a very personal response, not because it is a best seller but because of my family connections. My husband is a Holocaust survivor from Hungary. I have heard the stories he and his relatives tell and have recorded some of them in Hungarian Memories.

Two themes in the book resonate with what I had already learned. First, although Sarah’s secrecy was extreme, survivors shared very little with the next generation. My husband spent the war years with his cousin, who survived the camps but is now deceased. I sent a copy of the memoir to the cousin’s son, and he told me he wept as he read it because there was so much in it he did not know about his father.

Second, the French Jews were abused by the French police. Survivors were bitter about the complicity of their own countrymen in the roundups and deportations. My husband was born in Hungary. His mother died at Auschwitz and his father remarried after the war. They lived in New Jersey. I asked his stepmother if she would ever return to Hungary for a visit. “No,” she said, “the Hungarians killed my son.”

I took this picture a few years ago near St. Remy in the south of France. The sign marks the route of the French Jews who fled from Paris and made their way to Spain. The Jewish population of France increased in the 1930s as refugees came in from Germany and eastern Europe, to the resentment of many of the French. The “older” French Jews, who were assimilated and many of whom were also financially comfortable and had good connections, were best able to survive by fleeing or hiding. The recent refugees, like Sarah’s parents, did not have their resources and they were the ones who made up most of the Paris roundups.

Sarah’s Key tells of two women: Sarah Starzynski and Julia Jarmond. As a 21st century romance, Julia’s story uses too much contrivance and predictability. As a historical novel, Sarah’s story has the power to make past events and emotions real.

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz was an Israeli before there was an Israel. He gives a view of Israel in his novel Don’t Call it Night that I found unsympathetic, detached. Now that I have read his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, I comprehend his view of Israel through his own experiences.

Amos Oz was born as Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in 1939. He was the son of two young people who came in the Third Aliyah, in the years of rising antisemitism in Europe. In a leisurely pace he remembers the last years of the British mandate, the isolation of Jerusalem during the War of Independence, and his family life during the subsequent years. His views today derive from  bitterness developed during the years of Israel’s formation.

In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted. It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will united out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared fate. Often each sees in the other not a partner is misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor.

Political views are interesting, memories of the formation of Israel are instructive, but the moving part of the memoir is his account of his mother’s last years. The Zionists who came into the land in the 1930s were idealistic and middle class, motivated to create new, more perfect society. The Jerusalem in which Amos grew up was populated by middle European Jews, people who could not go back but who also could not fully accept the “oriental” environment.

My grandmother Shlomit arived in Jerusalem straight from Vilna one hot summer’s day in 1933, took one startled look at the sweaty markets, the colorful stalls,  … she saw the shoulders and arms of Middle Eastern men and the strident colors of the fruit and vegetables, she saw the hills all around and the rocky slopes and immediately pronounced her final verdict: “The Levant is full of germs.”

Oz’s parents were educated and aspired to intellectual life. His father, with his knowledge of history and ability to read 15 languages, could not find work as a lecturer when there were more lecturers than students. He worked as a poorly paid librarian, while Oz’s mother kept house in a two-room basement apartment and took students when she could. — and drifted into despair. We know from early in the book that she took her own life, but do know how or why.  The suspense builds when, in the last pages of his memoir, Oz alternates memories of his early years on the Kibbutz with memories of his mother’s last days. Until now, his mother’s role of his life has been suppressed. He remembers his father, after the funeral:

We never talked about my mother. Not a single word….

I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now, till I came to write these pages. Not with my father or my wife, or my children or with anybody else. After my father died, I hardly spoke about him either. As if I were a foundling.

In this memoir, Oz reclaims that past, experiencing the darkness, feeling the love.

Getting into James Joyce’s Ulysses

By one measure I am halfway through, having read 9 of the 18 sections of Joyce’s novel about a day in Dublin. By another measure, I have a long way to go, as I am now on page 218 of the 704 pages of this edition. So why am I plodding on if I have to count pages to encourage myself?

To prepare myself. Dr. Mark Schenker of Yale gives lectures in various Fairfield County libraries and senior centers. It was because of his series on the literature of war that I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried. In November he is going to speak on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a literary classic I have avoided until now. I am somewhat prepared, having read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the past and, more recently Homer’s Odyssey, on which Ulysses is based.

I have a guide as I follow Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin’s busy streets in 1904. The Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires provides an explanation of people, places and allusions. After I read each section in Blamires, I read the corresponding episode in Ulysses, with much less bewilderment than I would otherwise have. Yet something just is not clicking for me. Joyce is a clever writer and this is a clever book. I enjoy the wordplay, the weaving of past and present in the minds of Stephen and Leopold. I see them, I hear them, but I just don’t care about them much.

I want to care. I didn’t expect to care about the fate of Homer’s Odysseus, that self-confident ruler of Ithaca who left his wife to deal with things for 20 years, but I was enchanted with the Odyssey. Odysseus dodged and fought and lied his way around the Mediterranean and a great time was had by all, including this reader. The travels of Dedalus and Bloom about Dublin are much less compelling. Maybe they will avoid Scylla and Charybdis and maybe not; if not, too bad.

Maybe my shift in attitude reflects a shift in expectation. We expect Odysseus to be a sexist warrior but hope for something better from 20th century Dubliners. Joyce  is, if anything, more sexist than Homer. Homer brings us Penelope and Nausicaa with delight in their beauty and dignity and also some sense of their feelings. Joyce trivializes women with slighting names: Molly, Milly, Dilly, Boody. Stephen knows he is arrogantly entitled to his own education and opinions, but when his sister buys a book,

He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.

- What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

But he is surprised by this evidence of female intellectual aspirations.

Better incidents surely like ahead, but at this half-way point I want to record an honest reaction to Ulysses: it is clever but irritating at times.