Books #36-43 of 2020

I fell behind a little bit. The start of teaching is always overwhelming, and the commencement of a school year online was moreso. Finding time to be online for pleasure or personal musings is difficult when you end the work day with achy half-blind eyes from staring at a screen 12 hours. But, I am catching up here on some recent reads.

 

I discovered Renault by reading a collection of essays by Daniel Mendolsohn, an editor and contributer to the NYRB who corresponded with Renault as a teen. This is the 3rd of her wonderful novels about ancient Greece I've had the pleasure to read this year as a result. She had a remarkable gift for inhabiting and re-imagining this past and its characters. I'd rank her with Graves, Williams, and Vidal easily, and she might best them all. What she can't learn via astute scholarship she infers and weaves seamlessly into the known. 

Alexander as a youth had to navigate between the machinations of his mother Olympias--a princess from Epirus, regarded by the Macedonians as a backward and feral tribe much the way the Macedonians were regarded as such by Athenians--and Philip, his scheming and systematically ambitious father. Olympias consults oracles and sacrifices in her role as a cultist of Dionysus, while Philip conquers just about everyone and bit by bit advances toward his dream of bringing all of Greece under his empire and then moving East. Olympias and Philip are in constant struggle with each other, often to Alexander's dismay, but also to his benefit later in life. What he learns about power and influence in this household makes him the commander and gifted politician he later became. Renault's gift is showing it all, rather than telling.

The writing is beautiful, the characters are alive, and Macedon at the approach of its apex is fascinating. But the most lovely thing about the novel is Alexander's relationship to Hephaestion. From childhood pals to teenage lovers and into adulthood, there are few relationships drawn with so much tenderness and sympathy out of the hundreds I've read. We also get to meet Peritas and Bucephalus along the way.

 

The second volume of Renault's novels about Alexander is told from the viewpoint of his Persian eunuch and lover Bagoas. The first chunk of the narrative is Bagoas's own, and we witness the sad fate of his family and his capture. His decline from prince in an aristocratic Persian house to eunuch in another's is rendered with nigh unbearable sympathy by Renault. One can't help but root for Bagoas as he rises through the ranks of eunuchs kept for pleasure by wealthy men until at last he winds up as the favorite of Darius, King of Persia.

Of course along the way there are rumors about the barbarian Alexander, who has taken charge of armies following the assasintation of Philip, and is marching eastward. Bagoas is rightfully terrified about what awaits him if Darius is defeated and Persian conquered, and in this finely wrought and delicious novel we see indeed what occurs. After the fall of Darius Bagoas ends up in Alexander's service, and then in his bed. Renault deftly re-imagines the perspective of a Persian in the barbarian culture, and his surprise at Alexander's humanity and compassion and erudition. Bagoas as a long-time keen observer of intrigues at Persian courts becomes an invaluable advisor to Alexander, competing with Hephaestion for his love and attention, and through Bagoas's point of view we see many of Alexander's substantial victories, his illnesses and injuries, his close calls, and eventually his demise. A fantastic historical novel, easily one of the best I've read, and it surpasses even its glorious predecessor.

Not nearly as interesting nor as entertaining as the first volume (The Shadow of the Wind). Kind of a rehash of the same plot elements but the execution and the characters are a bit less engaging. But had just enough momentum to pull me through to the end and to interest me in continuing the tetralogy. 

These stories are top-notch Borgesian journeys into the outer reaches of creativity and imagination. Delightful and disturbing by even measure, I expect her to out-do Kafka and Calvino. This is truly a young author to marvel over. I want to learn more Spanish and read her novels in the original. 

 

And speaking of learning more Spanish in order to read the original--this is another young writer with tremendous gifts. Mexican Gothic is a Lovecraftian tour-de-force. An isolated European family inhabits a grim manse deep in the Mexican wilderness. The residents of a nearby town whisper about the manse and its inhabitants, and with good reason. They have created a monstrous fungi cult and are transforming their patriarch into an unspeakable horror from beyond time and space. Though Lovecraft seeps through this work (I see that Sylvia Morena-Garcia has edited a Cthulu-themed collection of mythos in the HPL universe), her main influence in English is likely Shirley Jackson, whose Hill House also permeates this creepy book. You can, and likely will, polish it off in an afternoon.

Sergio Argones has a mad and unrestrained imagination both as scribbler and as story-teller. I used to get MAD Magazine as a kid and the first thing I would do was look at all the marginal scribbles Argones had doodled in and around the panels of others' work. Groo was funny to my middle-school self, and still gives me chortles as that middle-school self fades more and more into the deep recesses of time.

Learn the language of these symbols. Dig their resonance with the subconscious. Let them awaken the eternal within you. Hand over the reins to the Universal and escape the cycle of samsara. And confront about 1,000 typos, mis-spelled words, and sentence fragments along the way.

I'm a long-time fan of Lewis Lapham. I used to lap up Lapham's intros to Harper's Mag, and when he stepped down from that post and moved over to Lapham's Quarterly I eagerly followed along. I bought this book from a recent list of books Lapham regarded as most influential. Reading Durant I can see stylistically and philosophically his influence on Lapham. This collection of essays on major themes in the study of history provided many useful gems for further discovery, and each topic could serve as provocation pieces for inquiry units in Humanities courses. Humane, erudite, and with an unparalleled grasp of world history, Durant might indeed take a large chunk of my remaining reading time here on Earth.

Book #33 of 2020: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A pure delight. A book about books and loving books obsessively, to the point where you track down a mysterious author of a novel and enter into an awful Gordian knot of conspiracies and vendettas but you still keep going because you need to know and then at the end you know and you don't want it be over. But it's not, because: TETRALOGY!

The setting for this marvel is Civil War era Barcelona. Everything about it is delicious. Wish I had know about these novels while Zafon was still alive, but I found about his Cemetery of Books books too late for that, alas. I shall read them all!

Book #19 of 2020: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

I was on a reading roll all year. What else is there to do as a global pandemic shuts everything and forces one to work from home and to stay at home 99% of the time?

On the internets I encountered a list of "Top 10 Novels Recommended by Medievalists." I'd read a few historical fictions of high quality so far in 2020, so I took the plunge with the Number 1-Rated book on the list, Labyrinth. It sounded fine, having Chartres and Languedoc as settings, and concerning in some ways the secret of the Cathars. Why not, I thought? It was recommended for its scholarship and intricate plotting, after all.

This book is a giant turd. It is the worst trash I've read since that dreadful The Girl Who Did A Bunch of Ludicrous and Impossible Stuff series. Every character is knocked unconscious at the end of a chapter and wakes up befuddled at the beginning of the next. Every character is replicated by a doppleganger who lives in a different century.  The concurrent story lines in the 13th and 21st centuries are both thin and uninteresting. The secret of the Cathars is dull and silly tripe stolen third hand from Holy Blood, Holy Grail and thence via that garbage churner Dan Brown.

There are highlights in this novel. The sex scenes are quite amusing, with "she could feel his desire for her pressing firmly against her back," or "she moaned as he slid deeply into her." A woman with a PhD goes to a public library for research about a particular labyrinth and types the imaginative keyword 'labyrinth' into Google, then prints 72 pages of crap that you could find in a child's book, marveling at her discoveries. All of the much-lauded "scholarship" in the book is delivered by one character to another in a tedious summary of Crusader history that Wikipedia would pull down in a day.

I honestly don't know why I finished it. It took 2 weeks to read.

Avoid at all costs, unless you like Dan Brown, which billions of people did. I will studiously avoid the rest of the Languedoc Trilogy and its secrets of the Cathars. Re-read Nancy Drew novels instead, which have stronger characterization, better plotting, and less pretense. This is like a long episode of Magnum, P.I. where Higgins dreamed the entire thing after digging up the Tiki doll from The Brady Bunch.

Book #15 of 2020: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Following on the heels of Alice James: A Biography, I decided to read Wharton's The House of Mirth for the first time.

Lily Bart is a confounding mess of a human being. I vacillated wildly from admiring her pluck and courage to really despising her materialism and privilege. I think she's the most frustrating heroine in any novel I've read, excepting perhaps Jane Austen's Emma.

It's amusing how Wharton's prose changes when Lily and Selden are together. Birds flit, dew glistens, the weather is always charming and distant vistas reveal mountains dappled with sun. And when Lily is around the wealthy suitors off whom she sponges Wharton's details are sweat drops on lips and cheeks, messed up hair ineffectually slicked back, annoying creaky sounds from carriages. I mean come on, Lily--don't you get it? "Why do birds, suddenly appear..."

But of course that is the point of the novel. Lily is a creature of her environment. She has adapted to what is expected of her and her class. And it was truly awful for young women of astonishing wealth and privilege to be trapped in those situations. There's the guy you should marry, and the guys you are expected to marry.

There is a lot of foreshadowing along the way about the ending. I noted each occurrence and convinced myself that that ending wouldn't happen. And when it did I was done in for the evening. How much really changed for young women between Austen and Wharton? Not much. How much has changed since Wharton to the era of Weinstein, Trump, and, yes, Joe Biden? Not nearly enough.

Book #14 of 2020: The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault

Nikeratos grows up back stage, working as a hand in Greek theater as his father plays dramatic roles onstage. Years later, his bravery during a performance when a crane fails and he nearly dies catches the attention of a Syracusan noble named Dion. Dion and his teacher Plato ask him to put on a performance of a play written by the tyrant of Syracuse, and Nikeratos accepts the challenge.

This launches not only his acting career, but his involvement in political scheming and conflict as Syracuse goes through fluctuations from tyranny to democracy and back. Plato senses an opportunity to mold the new tyrant of Syracuse to his ideals of what a republic should be. Part of this is substantially limiting poets and tragedians and their productions. Will Nikeratos come to regret his role in bringing Socrates to Syracuse?

Meanwhile, an old gilt mask of Apollo comes to manifest Nikeratos' conscience. He carries it everywhere and calls on it when making decisions. The voice of the God steers him through cataclysms and successes.

Another rousing historical novel of Ancient Greece--I will definitely continue reading these, and soon hope to take on Renault's Alexandrian Trilogy. Alexander appears briefly at the end of The Mask of Apollo to set the scene--Nikeratos had always regarded Macedon as a barbaric realm where kings are always getting killed. His encounter with teenaged Alexander hints at what's to come!

Latest reads: 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29

Book 31 of 2018

Thomas Cromwell is one of the supreme Machiavellians. Mantel's novel follows him from his lowly, brutish beginnings as the son of an abusive blacksmith who often beat him near to death and thence to the heights of power as King Henry VIII's most trusted and most feared counselor.

Surprisingly, as Cromwell plots the destruction of his foes and Henry's foes he remains a sympathetic character. One can't help but admire his astute knowledge of languages, finance, business, fine art and crafts, his keen apprehension of human nature and psychology. His past as a soldier and street brawler who knows the heft of a knife and how to use it, his use of sophisticated Italian memory palace techniques to keep reams of data organized in his mind--all of this makes him eminently likable despite his dastardly and often deadly machinations.

He has a nose for hypocrisy, and hypocrites tend to fall first in his schemes, and when they don't fall first their karma is used to keep Henry's world in order and to achieve his aims. Cromwell makes himself the indispensable man, and nobles from old blood lines tremble lest he target them.

I found the book deeply involving and fascinating, and look forward to Part 2...

Books 22, 23, and 24 of 2018

A Smiley novel without Smiley. I mean, Smiley is there, and his tendrils are woven throughout. But he is only very briefly present in the novel in a physical sense.

Alec Leamas is a more Bond-ish spy than Smiley, who mixes it up mostly in an intellectual sense. Leamas is an action man who works in the field. And his fate really lays bare the realities of that era and that region and the cold callousness of the Cold War. And that Cold War did not end as suspected decades ago but was carried on by the defeated side in new and ingenious ways. This is a novel so taught it thrums like power lines. I read it in about ten minutes.



I enjoy the 'descent into madness' genre of memoir. And when the memoir is written by a Surrealist and the long-time lover of Max Ernst at a time when the entire world had gone mad, well then of course it will be a worthwhile read. The first half of the book is an exquisite introduction, analysis, and biography of Leonora Carrington which is just as good as the memoir itself.



I just may begin collecting dew when the planets are in the correct houses, because Hall lets more of the cat out of the bag than anyone else I've read.

Books 20 and 21 of 2018

Have for a few years intended to read Le Carre. Call for the Dead has one of those immediately appealing English narrators who pull you up to the fire side and regale you with a finely spun tale. You know the sort of narrator of which I speak. And Smiley is an appealing bumbling sort of wise detective--I'd expected more of a spy/intrigue novel, but this is actually a murder mystery with some espionage overtones.

It's a good time to re-visit this Cold War era, what with a new Cold War in the wings, or perhaps the surprising new end of the Cold War after everyone thought it had already ended? We shall see. But this world of George Smiley and East and West and Iron Curtains and jockeying between Capitalists and Communists is the era in which I grew up, and how odd it is that it feels so distant now.

I found the novel appealing enough to continue with the series of George Smiley books. I like the portrait of England and English class structure after the War as its empire is dismantled and handed over to the Americans. There is the standard upper-crust snobbery and casual homophobia and anti-Semitism, but that of course was a feature of the age, and these features of English society are lampooned by LeCarre as much as recorded by him.

  

This installment is much less engaging than the first. This is more a Gothic mystery/horror tale with a gruesome murder at a decaying prestigious private school. The best bits are a sort of Evelyn Waugh-ish character whose disgust at the English class system and descriptions of its fraudulent institutions is rather amusing. But the plot is awkward and clunky, the characters are types who turn out in the end to not be what they seem a la virtually every episode of Murder, She Wrote, and as Le Carre describes the book in its introduction, there are some good instances of satire but overall it's a failed mystery thriller. I'd agree. But I shall continue with the series despite this disappointment. The end is particularly bad, as all the clues which have pointed one way suddenly are forced to point another and there is a quick arrest and then it just ends.

Book #3 of 2018

A very satisfying epic sci-fi/fantasy series kick-off. Reminiscent, in richness of setting and imagination, of Dune, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Riverworld, and the Saga of Pleistocene Exile, just to name a few of my faves from back in the day when I used to read these things much more often. The novel is structured in a very clever manner, akin to Cloud Atlas, and has a feel and sensibility similar to the furthest future in that excellent novel.

Now I'm embroiled suddenly in two sci-fi/fantasy series at once: Octavia E. Butler on the one hand and N.K. Jemisin on the other. Should I read Adulthood Rites or The Obelisk Gate next? I'm hooked on each.

Recent Reads

Love this short graphic history of the IWW and its radicalism, its struggle for justice for the oppressed, and its myriad accomplishments. Social Studies teachers take note that this has substantial usefulness if you teach economics, labor, civil rights, or race relations as part of your curriculum. I dreamed I read about Joe Hill last night--in cartoon form!




Had a nice conversation with a Lyft driver from Nigeria about politics in our home countries and about the immigrant experience in Trump's America. I told the driver about this novel, which focuses on the experiences of a half-Nigerian, half-German immigrant living and working as a psychiatrist in NY. The narrator sees the world mostly through a European lens, with European attitudes, tastes, and morals. He seems a nice sort, well-rounded and hard-working, intellectual and curious about the world. But he is unable to really connect with other immigrants, those living on the margins of Western societies.  Though he is familiar with and a bit sympathetic to their reasons for radicalization, he is too inside his European self to really understand them. There are nods to Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Franz Fanon. Late in the book a childhood acquaintance confronts the narrator about a long-repressed crime. This crime serves as analogy for the West's imperial/colonial crimes and their repression on a societal level. A beautiful and sad work, quite substantial.





And speaking of beautiful and sad works--damn! Great portrayal of Lincoln's grief at the loss of his son. The manner of story-telling here is documentary style, with snippets from correspondence, diaries, newspaper reports, and also from the POV of denizens inhabiting a purgatory centered around the cemetery where young Lincoln is buried, and where Abe goes late at night in his despair. Like most of Saunders's fiction, the tragic is balanced by outrageous hilarity. A brisk and thoughtful work, clever in construction and much deeper than expected.




Dixon is an acquired taste, one I acquired back in the '90s when I read Frog. No other writer peels back the curtain on his process to this degree--the reader is plunged into the reminiscences, revisions, and constraints that went into the craft of the story. In fact the structure of his work often IS the story being written overtly on the page. Knowing his oeuvre quite well, I would place this in the middle tier of his novels. It's quite frustrating at times and at others is deeply sad or hilarious. What I like most about Dixon's fiction is his ability to show through that unique voice our own fussy self-revisions, repressions, and constraints--how we craft our own stories about ourselves and those we love. I remember him signing Frog for me at Borders back int he '90s, and correcting by hand with a blue marker two typos before returning it to me. Mind you, Frog is like 800 pages long and he flipped quickly to both spots and made the corrections. Something one of his narrators would do, or do do, or would think about doing and then not.



Chunks of a giant comet smashed into Earth 12,000 years ago, destroying an already advanced human civilization. A few survivors roam Earth teaching other peoples the lost knowledge, and encoding warnings about the calamity's return in sites like Gobleki Tepi and the Giza plateau. I like Hancock's books--because I, too, believe there have been previous civilizations here that were destroyed, and that the presumption we have achieved the heights of wisdom and knowledge and that all who came before are "primitive" is likely the sort of hubris that sank the Atlanteans. But I don't always buy Hancock's arguments or his reasoning--what is a speculative leap on one page becomes an accepted fact later. But: FUN!





Sometimes gorgeous and wise, sometimes cloying and silly--but always worth the journey.

Book #29

Alexander reminisces to an artist friend of his wife Sonia about a peculiar affair he's had with an undocumented Polish worker. His marriage on its surface is quite successful: Sonia is beautiful, intelligent, and creative. She is a much more gifted architect than he, and the firm they run together is successful because she does the drawing and he manages the books.

But Alexander seems uninspired by Sonia sexually or intellectually or spiritually. He recognizes that she is beautiful, and that her ambition and architectural skills are better than his--and yet he is full of contempt for her passion and ideals. There's a scene in the novel when Alexander takes photos of Sonia asleep before they've even started dating. When she is prone and unonconscious he seems more drawn to her. In fact, Alexander can't seem to relate to anyone very well. Everyone is stupid, crazy, foolish, pretentious, or boring. It's unpleasant being trapped in his head.

So occasionally during his marriage Alexander runs off to Ivanova to continue an affair begun before he met Sonia. Ivanova is ugly, chubby, obtuse, dim, and fanatically Catholic. He despises everything about her, from her cluttered apartment to the Bible verses on the walls to her habit of watching moralizing soap operas and reciting the stories to him as though they'd happened to her. She does nothing but work 16 hour days and send the money home. And he is passionately in love with her to the point he pressures her into sex. She seems uninterested and cold during sex, but this turns him on even more.

Alex has no ambition. He works hard but finds no joy in it. His marriage is a sham and he doesn't seem to care. He treats his daughter the way his daughter treats her cat; he feeds it sometimes and calls on its services when he feels like playing. Otherwise she's an annoyance and a burden. He makes not a single true human connection in the novel with one exception, when a fat Frenchman in a shit-hole bar buys his drinks as Alex drinks himself into a downward spiral.

The artist to whom Alexander narrates his story is named Antje. Her paintings are of human/animal hybrids with large genitals in the act of copulation. Take that as you will.

Seven Years either precipitated or coincided randomly with a very bleak two-day depression of my own. It was heady fodder for self-reflection, a strange combination of beauty and soullessness.

A Dud Indeed

I wanted to like this. I liked some of it a lot. Much of it was terrible. Elaine Dundy I suppose had read Henry James--Daisy Miller, The American, The Ambassadors--and figured "Books like this can be fun in the right hands!" Her attempt to infuse a hip bobby-soxer sensibility into The Master's innocents abroad schematic is uneven at best.

The Dud Avacado got raving accolades, and continues to generate fans. I'm not sure why. I suppose it's because a woman wrote frankly about casual sex so long ago, and this was likely shocking to some and liberating to many. In an age, however, when women are filming themselves having sex and uploading the mpegs onto the Internets, this novel is a big yawn. The narrator is supremely annoying, falling in and out of love routinely, spending her uncle's money on booze, failing to note that she's being manipulated by more sophisticated Europeans and other expat Yanks. Spoiled rich kids getting bamboozled while traveling around Europe are not sympathetic characters IMHO.

There are flashes of brilliance, and quite a few F. Scott-worthy descriptive flourishes. Dundy can certainly write. Perhaps her portraits of bohemians, artistes, and poseurs were once fresh and vibrant, but now they're tired cliches of the sort most recently trotted out during that Freedom Fries nonsense. There's simply no there there in this book, which is as relevant to our age as Leave it to Beaver.

if you carried all the misery you've seen

It took me forever to finish Rabbit is Rich. Not because the book is bad, but I couldn't settle into it somehow. Updike's third volume takes Harry Angstrom into successful middle age and all that the American Dream entails: a house, a reprobate teenage son, country club golf, wife-swapping, and anal sex.

The soundtrack is disco, the malaise Carter's, the Iranians hold hostages at the American embassy. Rabbit is wealthy beyond his skills or efforts because of his wife's family business, and yet he remains restless, distracted by bourgeois concerns and a battle of wills with his son, whose behavior mirrors Angstrom's own youthful mistakes. Life accelerates beyond all comfortable reckoning.

#10

If you puzzled out the twists in Mulholland Drive you'll enjoy doing the same in McCabe's Winterwood. Redmond's idyllic marriage crumbles after Catherine cuckolds him. She takes their daughter Imogen away and Redmond falls apart. There are several intertwined narrative reminiscences, some of happy family life, some of Redmond's forays into the mountains of his youth to discuss local tradition with an aged fiddler named Ned Strange, and some about his current life, wherein Redmond works as a cabby under an assumed name after faking suicide.

Troubling details begin to emerge for the attentive reader. Ned Strange, whose fiddling and story-telling and knowledge of Irish tradition Redmond admires, is charged with child molestation and hangs himself in prison. His ghost haunts Redmond, and ugly facts about Redmond's past manage to creep through his unreliable narrative.

Is Ned what he appears to be? Is he simply a crude doppleganger invested by Redmond with his own dark misdeeds and desires? I can't answer here without spoilers, but the actual events of the story are obscured by Redmond's telling.

McCabe channels John Hawkes and Ramsey Campbell in this bleak character study. I think Campbell's Obsession or The Last Voice They Hear are better riffs on the same theme, but McCabe's is well-done. I'd not read him before and look forward to others.

Been a while since I found the time to read a book. Feels good to start up again.

#7

After reading about his death in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking I resolved to check out one of Dunne's novels. True Confessions was the only one available at the local B&N. I liked it fine. A crime novel loosely based on the Black Dahlia case, featuring whores, mobsters, monsignors, and cops all connected in seedy double-dealings. Tom Spellacy is the anti-hero detective, his brother Des is in line to be the next bishop. Because of a murder investigation both of them pay heavy prices for past sins. Ego te absolvo is not an option.

Apparently there's a movie version with De Niro and Duvall as well: