Review 2782: #RIPXX! #1949 Club! The Third Man

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The Third Man is my first choice for the 1949 Club and also applies to RIPXXI. As usual for the club, I’ll start out by listing books written in 1949 that I have reviewed previously:

I think I’ve read some of the children’s horse books (Black Stallion, Chincoteague), too, but it’s too long ago for me to remember back when I was a child.

And now for my review.

For those like me who are more familiar with the movie, there are quite a few differences. However, Greene explains in the Preface to my Penguin edition that the book was written as a preliminary to the screenplay, because he found it almost impossible to write a screenplay without a book.

The narrator is British Detective Calloway, who sometimes speaks firsthand and other times secondhand from information received from the main character, Rollo Martins. Rollo is the author of several pulp Westerns who has been summoned by his friend Harry Lime to Vienna. But he arrives just in time for Harry’s funeral after he was hit by a car.

Martins is at a loss, because at the time, shortly after World War II, British citizens were only allowed to take £5 out of the country, so he’s broke. Furthermore, Calloway meets with him to discuss Harry’s illegal activities, which are serious. Rollo, who has been friends with Harry since school and hero-worships him, doesn’t believe him. At the same time, Calloway wants to try to determine how involved Rollo is in Harry’s activities. Rollo is so incensed at Calloway’s imputations that he tells him he’s going to prove him wrong.

Rollo starts with interviewing the witnesses to the accident, who apparently were both acquaintances of Harry. This seems odd, and what is odder is that another witness, Dr. Koch, who saw the accident from the window but didn’t talk to the police, tells him he saw three men at the scene of the accident rather than the two who were reported. Who was the third man? And doesn’t it seem sinister when Dr. Koch is killed shortly thereafter?

Another complication is Anna Schmidt, Harry’s girlfriend, a Hungarian actress who is hiding under a false name and papers from the Soviets. She also doesn’t believe Harry is guilty. Unfortunately, Rollo falls in love with her.

This novel is not as suspenseful as the movie, but it excels in its bleak descriptions of post-war Vienna and the complications of its subdivided governance. It’s really moody.

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Review 2781: The Talnikov Family

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When The Talnikov Family was published in 1848, it stirred up quite the kerfuffle with its tale of an abusive family. In fact, it was suppressed. This novel is largely modeled on Panaeva’s own upbringing.

Natasha is part of a large family whose parents don’t pay attention to their many children except to abuse them verbally and physically. Natasha especially seems to be a target of her mother. The household also includes aunts—their father’s sisters—some of whom spy on each other and the children. When one of the boys goes to work for his uncle, his uncle seems to feel it’s his duty to beat him. And their mother hires a governess based on how strict she is.

The family seems to be upper class, but the girls are always cutting down clothing from the adult women or are padding out shoes that are adult sizes. They are poorly fed, because the governess likes to withhold food as punishment.

There isn’t much of a plot to this novel, just stories of superstition and mistreatment throughout the family. The novel doesn’t really have much of an arc, either, just recounts one appalling event after another, but it apparently began debates about such topics as gender, sexuality, and revolution.

Panaeva became a major force in the Russian literary world, running a literary journal that published works of the likes of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.

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WWW Wednesday!

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Sorry! I got back online for two days and off again. The issues with the photos are a result of trying to post from my phone.

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 enjoyed the other books I read by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, so I just started The Bent Twig. So far, it seems to be about a family that cares more about its members doing things that make them happy than social appearances.

What I just finished reading

I sneaked a more recent arrival to the top of my pile to read the latest book by Ann Patchett. I didn’t find it as impressive as some of her latest books, but I still found it deeply touching.

What I will probably read next

I have no idea where I heard about this book, but it has emerged to the top of my pile. So, it will probably be next.

Review 2780: Creation Lake

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“Only activists from Paris would take up subsistence farming in a place like this,” thinks the unnamed narrator going by “Sadie Smith” of Creation Lake. This novel has been called funny, but this kind of deadpan humor, along with comments about what she did not say, are about the funniest it gets.

Sadie is a provocateur who infiltrates fringe groups to observe them for signs of violence, and if there are none, sometimes create it. She used to work for the FBI until pressure from her superiors caused her to persuade a naïve young man into planning a violent act. Then when he and his co-conspirator successfully pled entrapment, her bosses threw her under the bus. Now she works for corporations and wealthy clients, not always aware of who her clients are.

For her present assignment, she has become the fiancée of Lucien, a filmmaker, just to get close to his friend Pascal, the leader of an activist commune in a remote rural area of southwestern France. Sadie’s mission is to again watch the group for plots and also keep an eye on a sleazy politician named Platon. The activists, called the Moulinards, are concerned about a plan to drain all the aquifers in the area to make a giant reservoir. Sadie will be staying in an empty house owned by Lucien’s family and helping Pascal with an English translation of some documents.

Central to the group’s beliefs is an email correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, their mentor, who has withdrawn from the world to live in a vast cavern in the area. Sadie has been able to crack his email to read his messages to the group, which are mostly concerned with the lessons they can learn from Neanderthals. Some of these ideas can make you think, but most are completely unsupported by science, yet presented as if they’re scientific. And a group less likely to commit violence I cannot imagine.

I have to admit to getting tired of reading Bruno’s rambling emails, and of course, Sadie isn’t a likable character. However, the book picked up in the second half.

I’ve read only two other books by Kushner, but one of them seemed also to be concerned with the intersection between wealth and fringe violent groups, not really a topic I find interesting. I read it for my Booker Prize project.

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What I Added to To Read in September

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Frankly, this month has been so fraught with stuff to worry about that I forgot this new feature until I saw Liz’s at Adventures in reading, running, and working from home, where I copied it from originally.

This is the second issue of my new feature, which I hope to post at the beginning of each month. I am listing all the books I added to my To Read list during the previous month, starting with the most recent. The trick is to remember what made me add them to the list.

I am doing worse this month when I know I should remember than I did last month, when I wrote the first feature off the cuff! So, if you think your review might be responsible for me putting a book on my list, please let me know.

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

I have to admit, this one has me puzzled, especially because I added it in the last few days. I could have sworn it was mentioned by Cathy of 246 Books, but it’s not mentioned in her September news about Irish literature. I also see the Literary Hub wrote about the author, but I can actually picture what the page looked like in my mind, and it’s not the page from Literary Hub. So, if you wrote about this book recently, perhaps in terms of an award nomination or lack thereof, let me know. Anyway, it sounded interesting. It’s a sort of memoir by the Irish poet.

Grand Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Nineteenth-Century Courtesans by Virginia Rounding

I am fairly sure I read about this book in the New York Times book section. Look! Two nonfiction books in a row! I think the title of this book indicates why it might be interesting.

My Husband by Maud Ventura

I actually tried to figure out a way I could tag books with where I heard of them in The Storygraph, but there was no way. I might have to start writing this stuff down, because I have no idea where I heard of this book. I would think this might have come from the New York Times feature, “Books We Liked this Week” except it was published in 2021. It was originally written in French about a woman’s excessive love for her husband.

Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks

I remember where I read about Farewell to Eden, because I had a discussion with FictonFan about not particularly liking Faulks. Her enthusiastic review made me add it to my list.

Blockers by Michael Lewis

Although Michael Lewis’s The Big Short was not about subject matter that usually interests me, it was actually excellent. Blockers, about people’s encounters with Trump’s “government efficiency” folks, sounds a little more down my alley. That being said, aside from yet another nonfiction book, I have no idea where I read about this one. Might be the New York Times.

Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus

Here we go again. I have no idea where I heard about Peck & Peck, but I so enjoyed Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry that I put it down on my list without even reading what it was about.

The Little I Knew by Chiara Valerio

It’s official. Starting today, I will write these down, because the farther out I get, the less I remember. In any case, it’s about the secrets of a woman who died unexpectedly, so it sounds right up my alley.

Prague Nights by Benjamin Black

I am confident that I put Prague Nights on my list after reading the review by Helen of She Reads Novels. I have read six of Black’s novels on my own (so I’m kind of surprised, Helen, that you said you’ve never heard of him, since I know you read my blog), so just the mention of this one intrigued, especially as I am fascinated by Eastern Europe.

So, here it is for this last month. I hope I do better at remembering in October!

Review 2779: Classics Club Spin Result! Les Misérables

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After reading Les Misérables for Classics Club, there couldn’t be anyone more miserable than me. It’s true that once Hugo gets going, he can write some exciting and interesting stuff. But he is so easily sidetracked into long discussions of peripheral or even no relation to the story—and that brings the narrative to a screeching halt. FictionFan kindly called these “digressions.” I call them, in some part, showing off.

Peter Washington in the introduction to my library’s Everyman edition surprised me by describing Hugo as

. . . vain, arrogant, pompous, selfish, cold and stingy; a windbag, a humbug and a fraud, absurdly puffed up with the immensity of his own greatness.

Then he wonders how such a man could have written such a masterpiece, and that made me think about what constitutes a masterpiece or at least what gets called one. Is it just a big long book by a bloviating male? Point of discussion for Classics Club maybe.

I started faithfully, reading all of the first 50 pages of examples proving what a saint the Bishop of D— is. Now, this bishop is pivotal to the plot in that he wins the conversion of Jean Valjean to goodness, but he also dies about 50 pages later. So, did we really need 50 pages about him?

For those who have been living under a bush, here is the setup for the novel. Jean Valjean is an escaped convict originally jailed for stealing a loaf of bread when he was hungry but now on stiffer penalties because he keeps escaping. In fact, he’s a galley slave for life.

Reformed by the bishop’s example of goodness, Valjean takes on the identity of Monsieur Madeleine and becomes a productive citizen, eventually owning a factory that produces jet. However, Inspector Javert is always looking for him.

Fantine, a lovely girl, is seduced by love and left with a child. She keeps herself alive by working in Madeleine’s factory, but she has to keep her daughter a secret because of the morals requirement of the factory. She has placed Cosette with the Thenadiers, who continually ask for more money while using Cosette as a servant. Eventually, someone rats out Fantine and she loses her job and later dies. Madeleine attends her deathbed, where she asks him to save Cosette. He is on his way there when he learns that Javert has mistaken another man for himself, so he goes to court and turns himself in. Back to the galleys.

All this action takes up the first 300 pages, but don’t worry—there are 1100 more. The novel is divided into six large books, let’s call them volumes for clarity, and each volume is divided into 8-15 books, which are divided into chapters and sections that are often short but sometimes not. I eventually figured out that the start of each volume was the place to begin a digression, but this also often happened at the start of a book. And sometimes just within someone’s speech. I started skipping whole sections once I figured out what was going on, and estimate that I skipped 200-300 pages. Frankly, I couldn’t take it.

Fifty pages on the battle of Waterloo AFTER he says he’s not going to explain the battle of Waterloo just to include a short section at the end—Read

Thirty pages on Paris and the bourgeois—Skipped

Thirty pages on the Restoration of the monarchy—Skipped

Forty pages of Jean Valjean’s soul searching—Skipped

These are only the skips obvious from the table of contents. I also recall the entire history of the convent where Jean Valjean hides with Cosette for years (only to end with a short section about his being taken on and then hardly another mention) and the history of the Paris sewers to name a few—SKIPPED and SKIPPED.

The problem even lurks in the characters’ dialogue. There are several passages meant to show off knowledge, say of literature or Greek classics—the last absurdly by Marius’s grandfather right after he says he doesn’t like books. And the one that made me laugh was a couple of paragraphs uttered about a new weapon (just before he’s about to shoot it) that sounded like they were from an encyclopedia. No one would talk like that.

If Hugo could just have stopped himself from rampaging off in every direction, this might have been a great book, and certainly the outlines of its plot have captured imaginations over time.

Finally, I have to take issue toward the end, when Jean Valjean confesses to Marius—all the bad stuff and none of the good. Marius gets it in his head that Jean has done terrible things. He has. He’s stolen a loaf of bread, escaped from terrible servitude, lived a blameless life, given plenty to poor people, confessed to save the wrongly accused, rescued and raised Colette, saved the lives of Marius and Javert. What a rotter! He is too tough on himself, and the book gets its tear-jerker ending at his expense.

Review 2778: Six Impossible Things

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The third book in the Wayne family trilogy, Six Impossible Things centers on Nicholas, who in the first book, returned from military service determined to try to keep the family house and be a guardian to his youngest sister and brothers.

It’s ten years later. Most of the family is away now, but all of them are returning home for the wedding of Miriam Arkwright to an Austrian count. Nicholas goes to the airport to pick up his sister Julia, who has spent the last two years studying music in Rome. At the airport he is admiring a lovely girl when Julia arrives with a bundle of packages. She hands him an airline bag and goes back to get more packages. Then Nicholas is accosted by a large, rude man, who tells him he is holding his fiancée’s bag. Nicholas says his siter gave it to him and he wants to make sure it isn’t hers before handing it over. The man, who is with the girl Nicholas was admiring, insists that Nicholas just took the bag to meet his girlfriend and becomes abusive. Julie comes back and realizes she has given Nicholas the wrong bag. They exchange, but somehow when they get home, they find they have the wrong bag again.

Nicholas asks Julia to write the girl, Elaine Morley, a note telling her he’ll bring her bag if she meets him. Instead, she arrives on their doorstep, having broken with her fiancé, Sir Kenneth Springer, and left without taking anything with her. Knowing that Kenneth Springer will descend upon them, Julia suggests she take up an offer of her old music teacher to lend his house to wedding guests, whom she and Elaine will tend to, and the girls move to that house.

Soon Springer arrives. To add to the chaos, Joey Helyon has returned to town to shoot a documentary, a more long-term way to help Elaine must be found, Julia has two young men courting her, and even Joey gets romantic.

This is a delightful light read. After three books, Nicholas deserves a happy ending.

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Review 2777: Short Story September! #RIPXXI! Excerpts from Vampire Tales

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For both Short Story September and RIPXXI, I decided to read something out of Vampire Tales, first reviewed by Kaggsy. This selection consists of a fragment of a story, a poem, a letter, an introduction, and a short story that are all related, according to editor Nick Groom.

The fragment is the beginning of a novel by Lord Byron. The theory is that on the famous stormy night when Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, Lord.Byron told the party his idea for his story, for which he had only written a few pages. Present besides Percy Shelley, Mary, and her sister was John William Polidori, Lord Byron’s doctor.

Byron died leaving “A Fragment” with his publisher, who asked Polidori to turn it into a full-length story, we assume using Byron’s plot. But the publisher released the story with no credit to Polidori and no rights to the material. The subsequent dispute ruined Polodori’s literary career.

So, I’m looking at “A Fragment,” a poem by Goethe that awakened the punisher’s interest in releasing a vampire tale, a letter, the introduction to “The Vampyre,” the work by Polidori, and “The Vampyre” itself.

“A Fragment” (1819) is just a few pages long, in which a young man travels with Augustus Darvell, a man of great reticence whom he tries to befriend but fails. Arriving in a Turkish cemetery, Darvell says that he is going to die and starts setting conditions for his burial. That’s as far as it gets, and no vampire appears, but I presume Darrell proves to be one.

The poem that piqued an interest in vampire literature is “The Bride of Corinth” (1798 in German, 1819 in English) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. It’s about a man who travels to Corinth to meet his intended. At his bedside, a beautiful woman appears and he falls in love. But she is not his bride. She was supposed to be, but she is dead, and he’s supposed to marry her sister. Tragedy ensues. I’m not much of a poetry reader, and 19th century narrative poetry is not very interesting to me. But it tells the story, not in a particularly scary way.

Next is a letter called “Extract of a Letter from Geneva, with Anecdotes of Lord Byron, &C.” (Gotta love those 19th century titles.) I personally don’t see a big reason for including it, since it doesn’t talk about the story but relates some gossip and refers to the famous night of inspiration.

Next is the Introduction to “The Vampyre,” by Alaric Watts (1819), which recounts some incidents of vampirism and includes a short history of vampire literature.

Finally comes the story, “The Vampyre.” Aubrey, a young man, becomes acquainted with Lord Ruthven, a handsome but pale older man who never shows an expression. The two agree to travel together, and Aubrey observes that Ruthven breaks young men and married men with children at gambling but is generous to scoundrels. Their ways part in Rome after Aubrey finds him apparently trying to seduce the innocent daughter of their landlady.

Going to Greece to look for antiquities, Aubrey falls in love with his host’s daughter, Ianthe. He is told not to go into a forest at night, but he does—

None of these are the most scary vampire tales, but the poem and the story end in doom and disaster. And probably at the time the notion was new enough to give a thrill just thinking about it.

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Review 2776: Land

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Although Land is mostly about one Irish family, it is also deeply involved with a piece of land, a peninsula that looks like part of the Dingle Peninsula. (Actually, it looks like the entire Dingle Peninsula, but the area described is too small.) Along with some history, O’Farrell bundles in some folklore.

It’s maybe ten or fifteen years after the last Irish famine. Densely populated areas are now barren, with most of the people dead or emigrated. Liam is 10 years old and feels he is too young to be helping his father Tomás with his surveying. His father is mostly a silent man, so Liam doesn’t know that as a boy, he rescued himself from the workhouse by putting himself forward for the same sort of job.

Liam is cold and tired. They are surveying a peninsula, and when Tomás sends him into a copse, he feels uncomfortable, even afraid, so he comes out and refuses to go back in. Tomás goes in himself and doesn’t emerge. When Liam goes in after him, he finds him altered, excited, talkative, delirious, draped with vegetation. He takes his father to the home of a widow where they’ve been staying, and his father continues to rave excitedly. The next thing Liam knows, Father Joseph is exorcizing his father, a brutal ceremony. It is at this point that the story returns to the far past and the history of the copse and of Tomás.

Tomás is back to being silent by the time the two return to their family in Dublin. He is not really functional, though, but stays in bed. His wife Phina is pregnant, and they have two girls, Enda and Rose. Phina is almost at her wit’s end when Tomás seems to rouse himself. The next thing she knows, he has spent all their money to lease a place near the copse on the peninsula.

There is a lot more to this family’s story, which is often tragic. It is certainly engrossing, and you come to care about most of the family members.

If I may hint at a spoiler, I was certainly shocked and had a hard time buying the departures of both Liam and Enda after a tragic event. It seemed so selfish. I actually had a hard time buying Liam’s determination to be a priest, especially after the treatment of his father.

However, this is a compelling story. Not only is O’Farrell a skillful writer, but she really knows how to draw us in.

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