Review 2757: The Hollow

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For the weekend, relatives are gathering at The Hollow, the home of Lord and Lady Angkatell. Midge Hardcastle is already there. She’s a pleasant girl who works an unpleasant job as a clerk in a dress shop rather than depend on or borrow from her relatives. As a child, she and her cousins spent their summers at Ainswick, Lucy Angkatell’s hereditary estate, but it was entailed and now belongs to another cousin, Edward Angkatell. Midge loves Edward and Ainswick, but Edward loves another cousin, Henrietta Savernake.

Henrietta has not left town for the Hollow yet, because she is working on a sculpture. Her cousin John Christow is finishing his work at his doctor’s practice before he leaves for The Hollow with his wife, Gerda. Gerda worships her husband but at the same time seems terrified of doing anything that displeases him. John is described as a person with good looks and charisma who is about to make a breakthrough on an important medical discovery. He is also having an affair with Henrietta. The other visitor that weekend is David Angkatell, a young man in the throes of university superiority.

Once they have all arrived, a neighbor thrusts her way into an evening gathering. She is Veronica Gray, a famous actress and an old fiancée of John Christow whom he hasn’t seen in 15 years. She has made the excuse of needing matches to interrupt their evening. John Christow has recently been dwelling on the time they spent together, so he sees her home and does not return until 3 AM.

In his absence, John finds that Veronica assumes he will drop everything and return with her to Hollywood, but he suddenly sees her for the grasping and selfish woman she is and refuses.

The next day, new neighbor Hercule Poirot comes over for lunch and finds what he first assumes is a tasteless tableau set up to greet him. John Christow is lying bleeding by the pool, and Gerda, who is regarded by everyone as slow, is holding a gun. At the same moment, Henrietta, Edward, and Lady Angkatell appear from different directions. John, dying, says Henrietta’s name. Henrietta attempts to take the gun from Gerda, and it is dropped into the pool.

Inspector Grange is inclined to believe that Gerda killed John, but Gerda says she found him and picked up the gun. Poirot thinks things are more complicated than they appear, and as it turns out, the gun Gerda found is not the one that killed her husband.

This is a situation with lots of undercurrents. Lucy Angkatell is outwardly warm and scatty but perhaps ruthless. Poirot begins to believe that the family knows who the murderer is.

The biggest problem I had with this novel isn’t to do with the mystery so much as the veneration everyone has for John Christow, who may have been a great doctor but was also completely selfish and oblivious to what others were feeling. Maybe Christie was drawing an accurate sketch of a particular type of person, but why are all these women in love with him?

However, the mystery was difficult. I had my eye on one character, but I was wrong. If a mystery writer can fool me, that’s all to the good. As usual, Christie’s characterization is excellent.

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WWW Wednesday!

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

I bought Klotsvog after enjoying Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator, a mystery set during the Soviet era. I haven’t gotten into it much yet, but it’s supposedly about the effects of anti-Semitism on a Jewish woman in post-World War II Soviet Union.

What I just finished reading

I just finished a book that I read for my Booker Prize project. It’s Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, about an Australian atheist who nonetheless goes to live in a monastery near where she grew up. There was a lot of talk about it a couple years ago, but I am not a contemplative person and have a black hole when it comes to religion, so maybe not the best book for me. It’s also going to be very hard to describe in my review.

What I will read next

I’m not absolutely sure what I will read next, but I’m thinking I’ll want to go a little lighter. The next light book in my pile is Roman Nights, a 1970s mystery/thriller by Dorothy Dunnett featuring Johnson Johnson, previously named Dolly and the Starry Bird. All of the original books were named after Dolly (Johnson Johnson’s yacht) and some kind of “bird,” that is, woman, and I suppose that’s why they are renamed.

What about you? What are you reading?

Review 2756: The Captain’s Daughter

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Of course, Alexander Pushkin is a revered 19th century Russian poet, but I’m not much of a poetry reader. So, I was interested when perusing the offerings of NYRB Classics to see that he had written a novella.

The Captain’s Daughter is a historical novel that ends in 1774, and Pushkin’s intent was to write about Pugachev’s Rebellion in terms of a romantic adventure novel popular at the time. Perhaps not its intent is the occasional glimpse of the power of wealth and position at the time. I didn’t really find the novel comic, although some of the dialogue is clearly meant to be, but the NYRB edition includes an article by one of the translators about the difficulties of translating the wit in the novel.

The opening, though, is probably meant to be comic. Pyotr Andreich Gunyov, son of a nobleman who is extremely wealthy (he is said to own 300 souls [i. e., serfs] at a time, a note informs us, that most landowners owned less than 60), informs us he was enrolled as a sergeant in the Semyonov regiment before he was even born and considered to be on leave until he was old enough to serve. I was too taken aback by this to find it funny when reading it but now I realize it was probably an exaggeration. Maybe?

However, once Pyotr Andreich is seventeen, his father decides he needs toughening up, so instead of sending him to the Semyonov regiment to live it up in the city, his father sends him to serve in Orenburg under his old friend Andrey Karlovich. Orenburg is apparently in the middle of nowhere at the time, protected by a small outpost.

On the way there, Pyotr Andreich, accompanied by his servant Savelich, is caught in a snowstorm with their guide. The guide not being suitably dressed, Pyotr Andreich gives him a hare-skin coat and some vodka. This encounter will prove to be significant.

At Orenburg, Pyotr Andreich finds a pleasant commander and not much to do at Fort Belogorsk. He almost immediately falls afoul of another officer, Shvabrin, who has been transferred there because of dueling. Pyotr Andreich also falls in love with Masha, the captain’s daughter, and wants to become engaged to her. Unfortunately, his father doesn’t agree.

Then they all begin hearing about a revolt of Cossacks and peasants supporting Pugachev, who claims to be the Tsar. When the fort is eventually surrounded by a huge number of insurgents, they defend themselves as best they can but are overrun. Pyotr Andreich would have been hung with the rest of the officers (except the rotten Shvabrin, who has gone over to the other side), but it turns out that Pugachev is the guide that Pyotr gave his coat to, so Pyotr is set free, but he has to leave the now orphaned Masha, in disguise as the priest’s daughter. Pytor is determined to rescue her somehow.

Although a sort of adventure novel, it isn’t really exciting, and Pushkin misses some opportunities to make it more so and to build suspense. It also makes an assumption that readers already know about the rebellion, so that the short novel has quite a few annotations. Of course, a 19th century Russian audience would probably know all about it.

The short novel is very readable and entertaining. I was just surprised at the omissions.

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Review 2755: The Heart in Winter

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Kevin Barry is certainly an evocative writer, but after reading my second book by him, I’m still not sure I like him. The Heart in Winter combines romance with brutality and some readers deserve a warning about foul language.

In 1891 Butte, Montana, the mines are booming, and the town is full of drunks and whores. Tom Rourke, a boyish Irish immigrant, spends his days helping a photographer or writing letters for illiterate miners and his nights drinking and doping. One day, mine captain Long Anthony Harrington comes in for a wedding photo of himself and his brand new wife, Polly. Their romance has been an exchange of letters, and Tom can tell that the wife dislikes her new husband. Tom is smitten.

Three weeks later, they put into action Tom’s poor excuse for a plan. While Polly’s husband is at work on the night shift, Tom will burn down the rooming house where he lives so that in the confusion he can steal the landlady’s money, and then they will steal a horse and escape to San Francisco. It’s turned toward winter, the perfect time to be traveling in the mountains. (I’m being ironic here.)

Of course, their plan fools no one, and the outraged Harrington hires three Cornishmen to track down the fugitives with the instructions to bring back Polly and do whatever they want to Tom. For their part, after a first burst of speed, Tom and Polly are honeymooning in someone’s cabin.

Of course, there’s a feeling of doom throughout the novel, and things don’t go very well for the couple. The novel is adventurous, with quirky characters, and gritty.

Another caveat, though. Barry seems to know nothing about what it would be like to travel in these mountains in winter. His inexperienced travelers would probably be dead in days.

I read this for my Walter Scott prize project.

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What I Added to To Read in July

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I’m stealing an idea from Liz of Adventures in reading, running, and working from home. She’s started listing the books she adds to her wish list each month. I think this is a great idea if only for myself, to keep track. In my case, I’d be working with the To Read list on The Storygraph, but I ran into an unexpected hitch. In The Storygraph, you can look at your To Do list in order of most recently added, but what it does not do is keep track of the date you added something to your list. At least, not that I can figure out. And I looked at the Stats page to see if I could run a report, but as soon as you select To Read for the books you want to look at, the date function goes away. So, you can only look at stats for the To Read list in total.

I have a question in to customer support, but in the meantime, I figure I’ll have to try to remember which books I added in July, and then going forward I can keep track by looking at my last post about it.

I also thought this would be a nice way to keep track of why I added books to my list, that is, where I heard about them, but I find I already only remember this information for a few.

Going backwards from the most recently added:

Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggins

Kaggsy of Bookish Ramblings wrote a review of this Golden Age mystery and another in the series, Why Did She Die? I was sufficiently intrigued to add the first book to my list

Furious Violet by Sarai Walker

I often read the reviews of books from The New York Times, and their review five days ago interested me enough to add this psychological thriller.

A History of France in 21 Women by Katherine Pangonis

This’ll teach me. Because I know I read about this book on one of the blogs I follow, but I can’t remember which one, and looking through my comments doesn’t help. Perhaps it was mentioned by one of the blogs I follow that posts reviews of a bunch of books at a time. If you recognize that you reviewed this one lately, please let me know! You should get credit! Perhaps this was a book for Paris in July?

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

This week I finished reading the book for the September session of The Marriage Plot (Literary Wives rebranded), which was Family Family by Laurie Frankel. I enjoyed that book so much that I decided to look for another book by her and came up with One Two Three.

They Stole a City by Lauren Collins

I’m pretty sure I heard about this book on an NPR radio program (OPB, Oregon Public Radio) while I was driving to art class. It’s about a shameful event in 19th century Wilmington, North Carolina, that was subsequently so suppressed that people don’t know about it. Look at that! Two nonfiction books added to my list this month!

The South by Colm Tóibín

I don’t really go looking for Tóibín’s books, but when I see one mentioned, I always get it. This one is an older work by him, and I think someone either reviewed it this month or just mentioned it, and I thought, here’s one I haven’t read yet. I don’t even know what it’s about.

Unseen: Blind spots and why we miss what matters most by David Lewis

Three nonfiction books! I heard about this book on one of the science programs on OPB. It sounded intriguing.

The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders

I have no idea. I could have heard about this on NPR, but I think I actually saw it on one of The New York Times lists of the books they liked so far this year.

Blunt Instrument by Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom wrote a mystery? What’s not to like?

Heather by Caitlin Mullen

I have no idea where I heard of this book. If you reviewed it lately, fess up!

Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr

Ditto! I know that Simon of Stuck in a Book went to Canada lately and bought a bunch of books. Maybe there? Yes! Here’s his review.

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U. S. History by Ned Blackhawk

I think I know where I heard of this book. I follow blackhawkfitness on Instagram, which despite its name is posts by a knowledgeable indigenous person about native culture. I’m pretty sure he talked about this book. If not, it got mentioned on NPR. Four nonfiction books!

I am stopping here, because the next book on the list is Solace House by Will McLean, and I’m pretty sure it’s been there for a while. On the other hand, the next one after that is Hunger & Thirst by Claire Fuller, and that seems more recent. But I’ll leave it at that. Next month, if people seem interested in this post, I will know exactly where to stop!

Review 2754: The Dead Room

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I like Catriona McPherson’s thrillers. I call them cozy thrillers because they usually involve a friendly community. The Dead Room is a little more dire than usual, and one plot point didn’t work for me at all, but I still enjoyed it.

Lindsay Hale in her mid-thirties is a new widow, her beloved husband Kai having died from a brain tumor. When he was dying, her old friend Chloe came out to their home in Hawaii to help. Finally, between her brother John and Chloe, she was convinced to move back to Scotland, to her hometown which she has never revisited since she left. There are hints of a traumatic childhood.

Lindsay arrives a day earlier than expected, and when she gets to her hometown, she breaks down while talking to an old lady, Peggy Marsh. Peggy takes her inside her beautiful, old, slightly rundown house and gives her tea. She falls asleep and arrives at her brother’s house very late, surprising her relatives.

Lindsay wants to find a house, but her brother tries to convince her to stay with them. Despite their welcoming, they seem to be concerned about her behavior. It is true that Lindsay starts having some visual perception problems and also doesn’t recognize people she’s supposed to know, but her behavior seems pretty normal for a recent widow, and her family overly concerned. They seemed to be trying to make her doubt herself.

A few days later, Lindsay returns to Peggy’s home only to find it empty. When she asks a neighbor about it, he is hostile. A while later, she learns that Peggy entered a nursing home and died shortly afterward, but when she goes to the nursing home, the man at the desk is hostile and the home oddly empty-seeming.

Lindsay begins to believe that she has something wrong with herself. She is able to buy Peggy’s house, but she hears noises at night as if someone has come in and actually sees a man leaving her house at night. But all the doors are locked, and the police obviously think she is being silly.

Periodically, we hear from someone else who is being held prisoner. Is it Lindsay at a later time or someone else?

My biggest problem with the book is that the gaslighting seemed so obvious to me, and it seemed as though Lindsay was too quick to doubt herself. Also—spoiler alert—once the plot comes out, it’s almost impossible to believe that some people would have wanted her to return to Scotland. Despite a brief statement of explanation, it makes no sense.

Despite my caveats, the novel is suspenseful and the main character appealing. I would just rate it slightly lower than some of McPherson’s more compelling cozy thrillers.

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Review 2753: Woman at the Window

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Although Elizabeth Burke leads a simple life, she enjoys it. She is looking forward to her new job in a bookstore when her brother-in-law Adrian calls. Her sister Anna has been told she won’t walk again. We’re never told what happened to her, but she has undergone two surgeries and refused a third that was supposed to either kill or cure her. Now Anna has asked Liz to come take care of her.

Liz is reluctant to go, citing a fear of losing her independence, but her issues are more complicated than that. And that’s one thing I liked about this book—everything is nuanced and complex, nothing black and white. Her friend and neighbor Lollie advises her not to go, but within a few pages, she has arrived at Anna’s home in Lakeville, New York.

There she finds a disturbing setup—Adrian is exhausted and seems to dislike her, having misunderstood her reluctance. Bunce, the cook and housekeeper, also shows dislike. Johnny, Adrian and Anna’s five-year-old son, avoids Anna’s room and spends most of his time by himself. Anna, who is charming to everyone else, is cold to Johnny. Adrian’s mother stays in her room all the time and doesn’t seem to notice Johnny much.

The crux of the novel is the relationship between the two sisters and between Anna and everyone else. Anna is charming and everyone loves her. Her bedroom receives visitors constantly. She talks affectionately to Liz but calls her her pony to other people. LIz has always adored Anna but previously Anna never seemed to heed her very much. She has seen Anna tire of people and doesn’t want her to tire of herself.

Liz is self-conscious about her looks and dresses badly while Anna is described as looking like Alice in Wonderland, fragile and beautiful. But Liz doesn’t understand her own qualities. There are a few instances, for example, when her intervention or comment helps another person, but she always attributes the help to Anna.

I disliked Anna. I could see that under her much-vaunted charm she sometimes makes knowingly hurtful remarks. Liz, although sometimes abrupt, is much more attuned to other people’s feelings. The situation becomes more intense when a friend gives Anna a mirror, to be put outside her house so that from the window she can see everyone who goes by. She becomes relentless about ferreting out people’s secrets, and she doesn’t seem to understand that she has no right to know them. Twice, she makes it appear that Liz has divulged someone’s secret when she has not and causes trouble by letting people know she knows their secret or by telling it to someone else.

Liz has a secret she doesn’t want Anna to discover. It’s that she’s fallen in love on sight with Huxley Reals, an employee of Adrian’s company. But Huxley is Anna’s devoted slave, coming constantly to visit her.

As Liz gets acquainted with the community, her influence begins to help particularly the people in their house. She pays attention to Johnny and he slowly opens up. She says something to get his grandmother to spend time with him. She cautiously makes some friends. But she believes she will be leaving, even continuing to pay rent on her old room, and everything in her life is overshadowed by her complex relationship with her sister.

I liked this book, which was published in 1951, a lot. I sympathized with plain, abrupt Elizabeth and felt she underrated herself and overrated Anna. I liked several other characters in the novel as well and thought it was an interesting character study.

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Review 2752: They Came to Baghdad

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British officials are awaiting the arrival of their man Carmichael in Baghdad. He is being sought after everywhere as others try to capture him before he can pass on important information leading up to the summit meeting that includes the President of the United States and the Premier of the USSR.

But then we return to London and the activities of two women. The mysterious Anna Scheele is being followed, while Victoria Jones is being fired from her job as a stenographer/typist.

In Covent Garden Victoria meets a young man named Edward and is immediately smitten, but he says he is leaving for a job in Baghdad the next day. Victoria decides she must go to Baghdad, but she has no money. She ends up taking a job to help a woman on her way to Iraq who has broken her arm.

Once in Baghdad, Victoria realizes she doesn’t know how to find Edward. She doesn’t even know his last name. Then, in her hotel room at night, a bleeding man dressed as an Arab breaks in and asks her to hide him. She puts him behind her pillows in her bed while a policeman searches her room, but when she uncovers him, he is almost dead. He whispers some words and dies. This is Carmichael, who has made it all the way to Baghdad only to be ambushed.

Mr. Dakin, a British official, appears almost immediately but is dismayed when he learns Carmichael is dead. He is forced to explain a bit of what is going on. Since Victoria is going to a charity called The Olive Tree to find Edward, and this place seems to Dakin to be a focus of activity, he asks Victoria to keep her eyes open. He also asks her to look for evidence of Anna Scheele.

The big plot in this book is a silly one, but I found it otherwise a lot more entertaining than Christie’s other espionage-based novels. It includes exotic scenery, kidnapping, and murders, an engaging heroine, and some interesting descriptions of the area and of archaeological digs.

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Review 2751: The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

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When I realized that the family in this novel was the Netanyahus—I mean, the Netanyahus, as in the prime minister of Israel, I was not looking forward to this book. However, it is part of my Pulitzer Prize project, and in fact won it, although I have never heard anyone talking about it.

Before I start my review, I’m beginning to find the quotes and book blurbs ridiculous, I have to say. Maybe some people actually read the quotes to select a book, but I avoid them then and only sometimes read them later when I am perplexed about a book’s reception. Here are some of the words on the back of this book—“genre-bending,” “exuberant,” “funny beyond belief.”

First, let me address “genre-bending,” which apparently applies to this novel because it combines nonfiction and fiction. Excuse me, but isn’t that what any historical fiction book based on real events does? Isn’t that the definition of historical fiction except perhaps in the case of some light romances or maybe gothic novels?

The novel is set at a small college in upper New York state, where Ruben Blum is the only Jewish faculty member—an American History professor—in 1959-60. Blum is asked to serve on the hiring committee when it interviews Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and its treatment of Jews. Although Netanyahu is living in the U. S., he is from the new nation of Israel. Blum doesn’t know how he’s supposed to judge the applicant’s knowledge since he knows very little about Medieval Europe, and he finally realizes he’s been chosen because he’s Jewish and he is mostly needed to provide hospitality.

For about the first half of the book, there was a lot of standard campus satire. My husband, whose first wife is an academic, always says that politics on campus are so brutal because the stakes are so low. I started wondering where the exuberance lay or when the book was going to become funny beyond belief as it made stereotypical humor out of two holidays with the in-laws, examined the different beliefs Jews have about Zionism, and explained Netanyahu’s beliefs.

I suffered through a ridiculously long, glowing letter of recommendation, which was countered by an even longer letter telling Blum that the reason Israeli scholars were gushing so much about Netanyahu was because they wanted him out of the country. Okay, that was kind of funny, but not funny beyond belief.

Finally, more than halfway through the novel, the Netanyahus show up for the interview and lecture—not just Ben-Zion but all of them: his wife Tzila and his three young sons—Jonathan, Benjamin (yes, him), and Iddo, ages 13, 10, and 7. And their behavior is outrageous. The book picked right up, and I can only assume that the critics who are gushing about it can only remember the second half.

I won’t say what they do—that’s the fun—only that in essence if not in detail, this part is based on a true story told to Cohen by Harold Bloom—although Cohen hastens to assure us that his character Ruben Blum is not meant to be Harold Bloom (right).

All I can say is, tearing things down seems to be more the style of these characters than building them up, and I guess that has continued up to today.

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Another short attempt at Book Serendipity

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It’s been four months since my last Book Serendipity, and unlike Bookish Beck, I have only come up with a few more instances. Book serendipity is when the same topic or theme or something like that comes up in more than one book read around the same time, but since I am slower at catching these instances, I have expanded it to cross-media serendipity.

Here’s my only true book serendipity this time:

Reading about The Princess of Cleves by Madama de LaFayette in Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer when it is the next book on my pile.

The last two are cross-cultural and cross-media:

Reading a historical mystery (To Cook a Bear by Mikael Niemi) with the main character Pastor Laestidious, the founder of a religious movement in Sweden when I live in one of the two areas in the U. S. populated by many members of an obscure offshoot of that religion.

Here’s my cross-media reference:

Mention of axolotls in The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb the day after them being an answer on Jeopardy.