What I Read in February 2013

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945. Klemperer, a German Jew who survived World War II in Dresden kept a diary of his daily life under the regime. This is volume 2; the first volume covers the years 1933-1941. I have commented on the travails of 1942 and again on the final years of World War II in 1943-1945: The Bitter End.

David Lodge, Out of the Shelter. Lodge calls this probably his most autobiographical novel. Like Lodge, in 1951, a teen aged boy who had lived through the London Blitz, spends several weeks in Heidelberg. Those weeks change his life.

In The Last Coyote, the fourth in Michael Connelly’s series featuring Harry Bosch, Detective Bosch is in several kinds of trouble which simultaneously trying to solve a very old crime, the murder of his mother, when Harry was a boy.

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love. Mitford’s social comedy, set in pre-War and wartime Britain and France, is pure entertainment. The sequel, Love in a Cold Climate, follows some of the same characters, plus additions The glow begins to fade towards the end, but it is good fun most of the way.

Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays. In a series of essays, Goldman develops her ideas about anarchism, suffrage and the position of women in the early 20th century.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot. That’s the standard plot in classic novels: they meet, they fall in love and, eventually, they marry so that they can live happily ever after. Is that plot still happening today?

Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died. After Emma Goldman, it’s quite a switch to Barbara Pym. Who is the “sweet dove”? She appears to be an elegant lady of a certain age who enjoys male friends who are not quite accepted as lovers.

Richard Russo, Elsewhere: A Memoir. Richard Russo is from Gloversville, a decayed milltown in upstate New York. Now he is Elsewhere, but he lived in both places with his volatile mother. This memoir is about their relationship.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. Does Raskolnikov regret having murdered two women with an ax? He regrets having bungled the crime, but believes the crime was justified by the benefits he would have received if he had done things more effectively. He considers himself superior to the women he murdered, yet he proves inferior in his role as executioner. Rashkolnikov’s egotism which values only his life, his goals, his very existence is so repulsive to me that I am unable to judge this novel fairly or comment on its literary value.

Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo

If you are in Gloversville, a decaying milltown in upstate New York, elsewhere Maybe  where you prefer to be. Not everyone feels that way, but Richard and his mother did – especially his mother. I have enjoyed and commented on many of Russo’s novels: Empire Falls, The Risk Pool, Bridge of Sighs, Nobody’s Fool. Empire Falls won a Pulitzer Prize, but Nobody’s Fool is my personal favorite. An interpretation of Gloversville appears in these books, and so does the portrait of a certain woman who, I now learn, was the mother he struggled with from boyhood until the end of her life.

 My mother’s deep conviction had always been that she and I were cut from the same cloth. From the time I was a boy, whenever we disagreed, she’d tell me that later on, when I was her age, I’d think as she did, an assertion that never failed to infuriate me, suggesting as it did that I wasn’t her offspring but her clone, and over the years nothing gave me more pleasure that to reflect on how wrong she was, that I most assuredly didn’t think like she did, and that time had only widened this gap, not narrowed it.

Later he reflects that he had been both right and wrong. Similar thinking, yes at times, but very different outcomes: “The biggest difference between my mother and me, I now saw clearly, had less to do with either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck….”

Elsewhere is a touching portrait of a disturbed mind and a disturbed life. I came away impressed not by the pathology, which was real enough, but by the strength and luck which kept Russo and his mother going.

What I Read in June 2012

Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women. This biography for young people, written in the 1930s, is accurate and insightful, if somewhat incomplete. No romance here, but a solid sense of Alcott’s accomplishment.

Sara Paretsky, Total Recall: A V. I. Warshawski Novel. The Chicago female private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Washshawski, meets schemers and crazies in this suspenseful novel of Holocaust victims, survivors, and the immoral insurance companies who rip them off.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low. Free at last, after 554 pages. Click here for my comment on the first half of the book. The second half is concerned with the structure of the French criminal justice system; the layout of the prisons and the courts (no corridor or staircase is omitted); the lawyers, magistrates, procurators, chaplains, turnkeys, police, detectives, detectives in disguise, spies, criminals — major, petty and demented. He puts forward some interesting theories about criminals. Instead of marijuana as an entry-level drug, we have the sex-obsessed man who steals a shawl for his girlfriend and goes on to a life of crime. It will be a long time before I persist to the end of another Balzac.

Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Housekeep Book. Peg understands. It’s not so much that I hate housekeeping. It’s not like war or mosquitoes — I do admit its necessity. It’s just that I have better things to think about, much less do. Written in 1962, the technology has changed somewhat, but the principles are as true as they ever were.

Richard Russo, The Risk Pool. The risk pool is where you have to get your insurance when you have had so many accidents no insurance company will have you as a customer. In this early novel, Russo tells the story of Sam Hall — energetic and smart, but also uneducated, sometimes alcoholic and always a risk taker.

Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves. By five pages in I knew that I had read this one before, but it was all so pleasant that I just kept going. No surprises in this tale of a young woman who settles — temporarily? she is not sure — in an English village, but a lot of worthy characters and amusing incidents.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life. To tell of the life of Cleopatra, Schiff must also tell of Caesar and Pompey and Octavia and Mark Antony, especially Mark Mark Antony. The life is skillfully told in a book dense with history and rich with the images of ancient Egypt.

Peg Bracken, I Didn’t Come Here to Argue. The switch from Cleopatra to Peg Bracken is to go from queenly edicts in ancient Egypt to American middle class commentary. These diverse essays are a follow on to The I Hate To Housekeep Book (see above). A little dated, but a welcome diversion after Ptolemaic troubles.

Susan Cheever, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. Just the facts about Alcott’s life with personal commentary by the author of American Bloomsbury. Cheever sees Alcott within her world, not ours. I hope to have more comments on the book in July.

Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

The Risk Pool is where you get your car insurance when your driving record is so bad no insurance company will have you as a customer. Sam Hall is perpetually in the Risk Pool, and that is where he feels at home. In Richard Russo’s novel we see Sam through the eyes of his son, who mostly lives with his mother but spent two important years with his father, sampling his way of life.

I have enjoyed all of Richard Russo’s novels, stories of the lives of errant and under-employed men in the decaying industrial towns of upstate New York. The Risk Pool is an early book, before Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls. Russo’s narrative command is not as smooth here as it became in the later books. Still, I relate to these people who accept who they are and where they are. They don’t love it, they just accept it.

What I Read in March 2011

Started in February, finished in March:

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris

Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

New this month:

Jane Gardam, Old Filth
Filth, as in Old Filth, means Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Try Filth.

Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief. The age of grief is the end of youth and the progress into early middle age, when you realize that you cannot escape the grief that life imposes on us. This early novella by Jane Smiley is accompanied by in the book by several short stories. I enjoy Smiley’s characters, especially their normality in an uncertain world.

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That. A memoir of public school life in England before World War I, followed by four years as an officer in the trenches in France.

Pat Barker, Regeneration. The first of three historical novels set during and after World War I.

Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs. The original Bridge of Sighs is in Venice, but they are also sighing in upstate New York, the setting for this novel in which people experience and consider complex relationships within apparently simple lives.

Katharine Greider, The Archaeology of Home; An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side. My niece had a new book out: the story of a particular house on a particular street on the Lower East Side.

Kelly O’Connor McNees, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott. This historical novel imagines the love affair the author of Little Women might have had one summer long ago, before she was famous.

What I Read in September, 2010

Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic. Russo does marriage and the academic life. These are different people from the sometimes frayed inhabitants of Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool, better educated and more self aware. Somehow I just cannot like them as much.

Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe. Mattie is divorced, full or responsibilities for two generations and a dog (and later an iguana), and slightly crazy with it all. We follow her life day by day and month to month. The details of her life are enthralling, but somehow I did not get the big picture here.

I have read and posted comments on the following books:

Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illlusions – Part 1: Two Poets
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions – Part 2: A Great Man in Embryo

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

Anna Quindlen, Rise and Shine

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Wanderers Three

James Joyce, Ulysses. On a June morning in 1904 in Dublin Leopold Bloom brings his wife Molly breakfast in bed and then goes out to wander about Dublin all day and into the night. Sometimes we understand what he is up to, but often we don’t.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. On a June morning 20 years later in London Clarissa Dalloway leaves her house and goes out to buy flowers for her party. Her passage through the city is more purposeful than Blooms, but also admits of the unexpected.

Richard Russo,  Nobody’s Fool. On a Thanksgiving morning some 60 years after that in Bath, New York, Donald Sullivan (“Sully”) hobbles down the stairs on his bad knee, uses a stolen snow blower to clear the sidewalk and goes out to look for breakfast at Hattie’s, followed by an off-the-books sheetrocking job. Later he encounters his ex-wife and other family members. It proves to be a long day.

Literature expands our view of the world by letting us spend a minute or day or hour in another person’s head, experiencing life as he or she sees it. These three books gave this reader three very different experiences.

I loved Sully. I’m not sure why and probably would not if I met him, but I loved how he takes  life as it comes, mostly calmly and with good humor, but not always. He travels his day aware of the demands on him and choosing which ones to take seriously.

Maybe sheetrocking wasn’t one of Sully’s favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you care to look, and once you found this rhythm it’d get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years – that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through.

Sully does the work, but he is a person, not the work. I enjoy experiencing that with him.

I go back and reread Mrs. Dalloway every ten years or so because I always find it has something new to offer me. The first time around – when I was much younger – I wrote her off as a society woman, shallow, concerned only with surfaces. But what surfaces!

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she though herself clever, or much out of the ordinary…. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now… and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this….

Here is a woman who lives in her moment and other people’s moments and lets me share them with her. It is not surprising that she mentions recovering from a serious illness. Illness will do that for you: make clear the preciousness and wonder of an ordinary life, not a clever one.

James Joyce puts us into and out of the consciousness of Leopold Bloom (and Stephen Dedalus) on the June day in Dublin, but I am never in their lives as I am with Sully and Clarissa. I experience a tangle of words in which I don’t always know whose consciousness I am in, nor can I distinguish between thought fragments and perception fragments. Sometimes I receive a simple sensory report, sometimes conclusion or comparison, sometimes a memory, at other times a description of external events. All have approximately equal weight – it is up to me to sort them out.

You can regard this as very clever, but I react to it as Joyce toying with the reader. Look how I can make you uncomfortable with an absence of boundaries. Look how I creatively expose you to 18 different styles in 18 different sections. Look how clever I am! I finished the book, something I challenged myself to do. Now I need to let it settle. Maybe in a few years I’ll go back, maybe I’ll see it differently then.

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.