What I Read in July 2012

This month I was involved with two long and complex books — The Folks and Tess of the D’Urbervilles — with alternate, multiple postings. Thanks for your patience.

Ruth Suckow, The Folks. This 1934 novel tells the lives of an Iowa couple, the Fergusons, and their extended family, beginning before World War I and ending during the Great Depression. I have commented by sections:

Ruth Suckow, The Folks (Parts 1 and 2)
Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Continued (Parts 3 and 4)
Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Concluded (Parts 5 and 6)

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Sarah (A Rat in the Book Pile) and I have been reading this classic together and commenting jointly.
I – The Maiden and Maiden No More
II – The Rally and The Consequence
III – The Woman Pays and The Convert
IV – Fulfillment

Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. I learned about globalization in Paris z dozen years ago. I penetrated into a real French department store (no English spoken here) and went looking for t-shirts. I didn’t know what they are called in French, of course, but I quickly learned they are called t-shirts. In this fascinating book, an economist follows her t-shirt on its travels, beginning in the cotton fields of Texas and ending in the second-hand market of Dar Es Salaam.

Michael Lewis, Moneyball. I avoid professional sports and I avoid talking about professional sports, so who would predict I would enjoy this book about how to manage a professional baseball team when you don’t have a lot of money to spend on star players? It’s a great little morality tale about conventional wisdom in any area of life.

I have posted on the two books together: Not Dismal at All.

Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March. Three generations of the Trotta family serve and are served by the long-lived Hapsburg Franz Joseph, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither Franz Joseph nor the Trottas survive the Great War.

Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool. This book contains three novellas by the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. Each story is told in first person and is unsettling in some way. I found the narratives hard to understand and the emotions difficult to relate to. The author’s detached tone worked for me in The Housekeeper and the Professor, but leaves these stories outside my circle of enjoyment.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Conservative. New York Times columnist and Novel laureate (economics) describes the ups and downs of liberal programs in modern America and suggests areas for improvement. The book, published in 2007, does not include the collapse of the housing bubble, the ensuing financial crisis or the election of Obama.

Geraldine Brooks, March. Pulitzer-Prize winning novel imagines the story of Mr. March, the father of the four girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In that book, March is with the troops, but we do not hear what he is doing there. In this book, we find that his life is greatly changed by his wartime experiences.

Josephine Johnson, Now In November. This 1930s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel brings us hard times on the farm. A family struggles to extract enough from the natural world to deal with the outside world of hard time economics and the cruel circumstances of a drought.

Josephine Johnson, Now in November

Inspired by Following Pulitzer’s favorable review, I have read Josephine Johnson’s little-known 1934 Pulitzer-prize novel, Now in November.

The Haldemarne family — father, mother, three daughters — are experiencing hard times on the farm. For ten years they have struggled to make a living and pay the mortgage. Let me reverse that. First, they pay the mortgage and then they live on what is left. Unlike the family in The Grapes of Wrath who must move on after they lose their land, the Haldemarne’s are hanging on, still surviving somehow and now in a drought year.

From the beginning, each member of the family sees the struggle differently.

The land was stony, but with promise, and sheep grew fat in the pastures where rock ledges were worn back, white like stone teeth bared to front. There were these great orchards planted up and down the hills, and when Mother saw them that first day she thought of having to gather the crop and haul the applies up this steepness, but she only said a good harvest ought to come, and the trees looked strong though old. “No market even if they bear,” I remember Father said: and then, — “it’s mortgaged land.”

The father is embittered by the mortgage and the economic system which has forced it on him. The mother just wants peace. The two younger daughters, Merle and Marget (who tells this story), love the land and the nature with which they are now in close contact. The older daughter is slightly mad, and becomes more so.

It is now November, and Marget is looking back on that terrible year. We know from the beginning that it will not end well. The greatest grief does not come from the hard times but from the disaster of misunderstanding and madness within the family. It is plainly and sparely told. Marget has a true spirit and cannot speak other than truth. She loses love:

Now there’ll be peace, I told myself. I can learn to accept, feel free to begin again and rebuild life on something else, on something more than the sight of him, which had been a bitter sufficiency until then.

She loses beloved family members. She does not know why, but she recognizes the indifference of God or nature.

How much of what came to us came of ourselves? Was there anything that we could have done that we did not do? God — if you choose to say that the drought is God — against us. The world against us, not deliberately perhaps, more in a selfish than malicious way….

It’s a bleak view, but an honest view. Marget is still here and the farm is still here and so is the natural world which will survive them all. She tries to make it be enough: “I cannot believe this is the end.”