Day 375: King Lear

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Cover for King LearKing Lear is about fathers and their children–in particular, how two fathers misjudge their children, mistaking flattery and trickery for love, and push away those who sincerely love them. It is also about the responsibilities of power.

We all know the plot. King Lear has three daughters, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. As he is an old man, Lear wants to rid himself of the cares of governing while keeping the title and prerogatives of his office. So, he proposes to divide his property among his daughters but first sets them a silly test of telling him how much they love him to determine the sizes of their gifts. Regan and Goneril reply fulsomely, but Cordelia, who is not comfortable with expressing feelings, replies with restraint. Lear, who had planned to give her the biggest piece as she is his favorite, banishes her and splits his kingdom between the two other sisters.

In a parallel story, the Duke of Gloucester has two sons. His eldest, Edgar, is legitimate, while Edmund is not. Edmund, who is a lot like Iago but with more cause, decides to take all that Edgar has, so he forges a letter that makes it seem as though Edgar is trying to tempt Edmund into murdering their father. He also keeps Edgar away from Gloucester by making him think that he, Edmund, is on Edgar’s side and telling him that Gloucester is angry.

In both cases the fathers, without considering their own experiences of their children’s qualities, throw away the loving child and favor the conniving children.

One metaphor throughout the play is that of sight. Neither father can see what is plainly before him. Gloucester actually loses his sight during the course of the play, and Lear goes mad before he can see clearly.

Madness also factors heavily in the play. Lear is driven mad with grief when he sees his older daughters for what they are, while Edgar pretends to be a madman to hide from his brother and father. Of course, madness is exciting in the theatre because a mad character is allowed to say anything, but Lear’s lines seem very obscure to me, unlike Hamlet’s when he was pretending to be mad.

This play seems to me to be rather disorganized. A lot of time is spent wandering around on the moors, with different characters running into other characters. I confess to finding that part tedious. Cordelia, who in one way is so important to the play, spends most of it offstage, while the fool, who is a dominant character at the beginning of the play, is ruthlessly killed in the middle of it. I am not sure of the point of the scene where Edgar makes his father think he has committed suicide by leaping off a cliff. All in all, this play seems rather messy to me.

Day 374: A Plague of Lies

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Cover for A Plague of LiesA Plague of Lies is the third in the mystery series set in 17th century France and featuring Charles du Luc, a master of rhetoric at the Louis le Grand school in Paris.

Charles is dismayed when he is summoned to escort Père Jouvancy to the court at Versailles to present Madame de Maintenon with the gift of a holy relic. Madame is angry with the Jesuits because the King’s confessor, Père la Chaise, convinced the King not to give her the title of Queen, so the gift is an attempt to regain favor. Although Charles disapproves of what he sees as the Sun King’s constant self-glorification, he must escort Père Jouvancy, an old man who is just recovering from an illness that is raging through Paris.

On their way to Versailles, Charles and Jouvancy encounter Lieutenant-Général de la Reynie, head of the Paris police, whom Charles has assisted on occasion. La Reynie asks Charles to keep an eye on the Prince of Conti while he is there and to listen to what is said about him.

Once at court, though, Père Jouvancy has a relapse, and Charles comes close to witnessing the death of a much-disliked man, the Comte de Fleury. Apparently, he too was ill and running for the latrine when he slipped on the wet floor and fell down the stairs. The rumor is that he was writing a scandalous memoir, and poison is immediately mentioned. When the other members of Charles’ party fall ill, there are more rumors of poison, but all the men seem to just have food poisoning.

De Fleury does appear to have been poisoned, however, and Charles observes several people going in and out of his room, including the Duc du Maine, son of the King. Charles finds himself getting embroiled in the problems of the Duc’s sister, Mademoiselle de Rouen, who is soon to be engaged to the son of the King of Poland and is not happy about it. Charles also observes Conti behaving suspiciously. Next, a gardener is found drowned.

The novel presents us with a convoluted plot but also with a fascinating portrait of the court at Versailles. Rock’s knowledge of the period, even of how the places she describes would have appeared at that time, seems convincingly complete. Her novels are always absorbing.

Day 373: Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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Cover for Tell the Wolves I'm HomeBest Book of the Week!

Although I think Tell the Wolves I’m Home is classified as a young adult novel, it has much to offer adults, too, in reading pleasure. Carol Rifka Brunt gives us a novel in which the voice of the narrator is so strong and the sense of her personality so developed that it is really outstanding.

Fourteen-year-old June Elbus is an unusual girl–a loner who likes to go to the woods and pretend she is living in the middle ages. She loves her Uncle Finn more than anyone and believes he is the only person in the world who understands her. She used to be close to her older sister Greta, but for some reason Greta has started treating her badly. So, when Finn dies of AIDS, June feels as if she has no one. The situation is made worse because it is the 1980’s, and no one understands the virus.

Something strange happens at Finn’s funeral. A man June has never seen before appears and tries to get her attention, but her sister hustles her away. Days later her uncle’s favorite teapot arrives for her with a note in it. The writer explains that he is a friend of Finn’s and asks to meet her. But Greta has told her that this friend, Toby, killed Finn.

A problem is posed by the portrait Finn spent the last months of his life painting. It is one of June and Greta, although Greta acted as if she didn’t want to sit for it. The Elbuses have the portrait in their living room until an article appears about lost works of art, including a picture of the portrait and reporting that its title is “Tell the Wolves I’m Home.” Until then, June didn’t even know her uncle was a famous artist. And who could have photographed the portrait and sent the article to the magazine?

June agrees to meet Toby but becomes jealous of him when she realizes how close he was to Finn. She is shocked to find they were partners for nine years, and she never knew he existed. June is torn because of her ambivalent feelings about Toby and the fact that they are keeping their acquaintance a secret from her parents, until she finds a note to her from Finn in a book, asking her to take care of Toby because he has no one.

Infused throughout with the voice of its teenage narrator, a girl like so many others struggling with feelings of self-doubt, trying to figure out what is right, this novel is beautiful and moving without being in the least sappy. It is really a wonderful book.

Day 372: A Trick of the Light

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Cover for A Trick of the LightThe morning after the village of Three Pines throws a big party to celebrate Clara Morrow’s show at the prestigious Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the body of a murdered woman is found in Clara’s garden. The body turns out to be that of Clara’s childhood friend Lillian Dyson, whom she has not seen in more than 20 years.

Clara’s friendship with Dyson was broken because Dyson cruelly betrayed her in art school. This puts Clara on the list of suspects. However, as Inspector Gamache’s team investigates Dyson, they find that she has a reputation for doing harm to others by trying to ruin their careers in art, providing a broad field of suspects, especially after a party celebrating an art debut.

On the other hand, Dyson is viewed completely differently by her new circle of acquaintances, which leads Inspector Gamache to wonder if people can really change their natures. Eventually, the police realize that Dyson was on a 12-step program and that she was probably intending to ask forgiveness of one of the people at the party.

On another front, Clara seems to be headed toward trouble in her marriage. Although her husband Peter has been happy with his own moderately successful career in the art field, now that Clara may be proving to be more talented than he is, he is becoming jealous and insecure.

Although this mystery has Penny’s usual hallmarks of beautiful description and insight into people’s characters, I do not like where the plot involving Jean Guy Beauvoir is going. Also, I thought it took the police an awfully long time to figure out about the 12-step program.

Day 371: A Good Hard Look

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Cover for A Good Hard LookA Good Hard Look is a novel about the last few years of writer Flannery O’Connor’s life. The book begins with the wedding of Cookie Himmel and Melvin Whiteson, which Cookie believes has been ruined because Flannery’s peacocks made so much noise the night before that Cookie fell out of bed and gave herself a black eye. Flannery’s mother Regina insists that Flannery attend the wedding, but Cookie is not happy to see her there.

Lona Waters lives her life absentmindedly and takes pleasure only in the hour of solitude she has every day before her daughter Gina comes home from school. Then her friend Miss Mary asks her if she will give her awkward teenage son Joe a job, thereby eliminating her hour.

Soon Melvin Whiteson has struck up a friendship with Flannery, but he keeps it a secret from his wife because of her dislike of the writer. Cookie is busily serving on committees in town and trying to get Flannery’s books banned from the library, while Melvin, a successful New York banker who gave up his career to move to this small town in Georgia with Cookie, is feeling out of place and bored with his insurance job.

These seemingly mundane stories eventually result in tragedies that force the main characters to take a good hard look at themselves, as Flannery states is a technique she uses in her fiction.

The novel is well written but not evocative. It does not evoke the 60’s South, and my feeling is that it does not evoke Flannery O’Connor. I am not an expert on her or her life, but the incisive spirit I would expect from her is missing in this character. Napolitano uses O’Connor’s peacocks to great effect, but I found that the novel tidied things up a bit more neatly than I would expect from one inspired by O’Connor’s life and works. Finally, the character of Cookie is essentially a caricature of the southern junior matron, similar to Hilly Holbrook in The Help, although Cookie evolves a bit. Most of the other characters are only sketchily drawn.

It is rather risky to use an actual person as a main character in a novel, especially if you are not able to create a character who is convincing as that person. For a much better attempt at using a famous writer as a main character, see Colm Toíbín’s wonderful The Master.

Day 370: The Preacher

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Cover for The PreacherA little boy on vacation in the fishing village of Fjällbacka goes out early one summer morning and sees the body of a young woman in a crevice called the King’s Cleft. When the police come to remove the body, they discover bones of two more women beneath it. The medical examiner finds that many of the bones were broken, not only in the recent corpse but in the old remains, in exactly the same way.

Eventually, the older bodies are identified as Siv Lantin and Mona Thernblad, two young women who disappeared 25 years before. Although those crimes were never solved, Gabriel Hult reported that he saw his brother Johannes with Siv Lantin the night she disappeared. Johannes later committed suicide, according to his family because he was innocent and couldn’t bear the suspicion.

Patrik Hedström is on vacation with his massively pregnant wife Erica, the main character of Läckberg’s first novel, but he is called back to head this investigation. Soon the situation becomes more urgent, because another young woman who is staying in a local campground with her parents disappears while hitchhiking into town.

Fearing that Johannes Hult is perhaps not actually dead, Patrik has his body exhumed. Johannes is indeed dead, but he was murdered, not a suicide, and semen found on the most recent victim’s body belongs to a close relative of Johannes.

This situation still leaves Patrik with several suspects in the feuding Hult family, all descendents of a leader of an odd religion that believes in faith healing. Gabriel Hult inherited the property of patriarch Ephriam Hult, known as “The Preacher,” leaving Johannes’ sons Stefan and Robert poverty stricken. Gabriel’s son Jacob runs a farm for reforming delinquent teens and continues with his grandfather’s religious work, although he does not have the ability of faith healing that his father and uncle supposedly possessed as boys.

While Patrik stresses over the case, Erica suffers in the oppressive summer heat and tries to cope with holiday guests who descend upon them without notice.

As with Läckberg’s previous novel, The Ice Princess, I liked this book perhaps more than it deserves. Patrik and Erica make attractive, likeable main characters, and the characterizations seem to have more depth in general than I’ve found with other Swedish police procedurals. However, again, Läckberg’s writing seems clumsy at times, particularly the dialogue.

Aside from a confusing typo early in the book where Johannes is referred to as Stefannes, I had a serious problem with the chronology of the mystery. The older crimes took place in 1979 and yet 30ish Patrik and Erica both say they remember them, not that they heard of them. This discussion confused me so much that I actually looked up the original publication date of the book, thinking that it may have come out earlier than I thought, but it was published in 2004. Although I suppose this timing is not impossible, it may have worked better to have an older police officer clue Patrik in to the details of the case.

The police investigation details also seem a little odd. It is hard for me to believe that any police station in Sweden would still have a modem connection. In addition, maybe they do things differently in Sweden, but blood tests for DNA analysis seem excessive. Of course, they are necessary for the plot, which, if that is the only reason they are done, makes them a cheat.

The Ice Princess depended for its plot mostly on Erica poking around where she shouldn’t be, and I think that works better for Läckberg than a police procedural, about which she seems to need to do more research. Nevertheless, despite these criticisms, I still find myself liking these books a lot.

Day 369: The Alchemist

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Cover for The AlchemistIn my opinion, a fable for adults requires something striking to hold the attention. Telling the story as one would to a child is not going to cut it. It must be wittily written or beautifully illustrated or have some other compelling characteristic.

I have to admit I did not finish this fable about a Spanish shepherd boy who is told to travel to Egypt to find his “personal legend.” I found it heavy handed in approach and did not find anything special about the way the story was told to make it outstanding. I found the fairy tale writing style irritating.

I know this book has been very popular, but it is not the book for me. I guess I am reminded of the popularity years ago of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, another book I thought was wildly overrated. I could tell where The Alchemist was going within 50 pages, and I didn’t want to go with it.

Day 368: Dead Lagoon

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Cover for Dead LagoonDead Lagoon is the most atmospheric of the Aurelio Zen mysteries I have read. In the novel, Zen returns to his home town of Venice, ostensibly to look into the “haunting” of the Contessa Zulian, his mother’s old employer, who is convinced that costumed “swamp dwellers” are invading her home. The contessa has long ago been deemed batty because of a tale she has been telling for years about a missing daughter. Although Zen has hitherto been incorruptible, he is actually there to work on the case of a missing wealthy American businessman, being paid under the table by the businessman’s family.

As Zen wanders or boats through the misty winter setting of Venice, visiting places he knew in his youth, he keeps stumbling over “ghosts,” some from his own past, and some actual dead bodies. A fisherman who spotted a ghost on the Isle of the Dead is drowned, then a crooked cop, head of the Venice drug squad, is found smothered in a sewer. In the search for the ghost on the cemetery island, an unexplained skeleton is found.

Zen’s investigation leads to a string of discoveries, of dishonest police, drug smuggling, and ambitious local politicians. His biggest discovery, though, is about his own family, including that nothing is what he thought it was.

I think what makes this Aurelio Zen book stand out is its depiction of Venice. The plot itself is rather disjointed and difficult to explain. Zen is able to solve both cases, but some readers have expressed frustration about the conclusion.

Day 367: Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

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Cover for Between the Woods and the WaterBest Book of the Week!

In December 1933, 19-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from Amsterdam to Constantinople. He wrote about the first leg of this journey years later in A Time of Gifts, ending the book as he crossed a bridge from Czechoslovakia into Hungary. In 1986, he finished this memoir of the second leg of the journey, which begins on that same bridge in Esztergom the evening of Easter Sunday and ends in the early autumn of 1934.

In the second part of the journey, Leigh Fermor breaks his rule of making the entire trip by foot and also spends much of the time in more luxurious surroundings than he did in the first part. As he makes his way through Hungary and the Romanian border, as it was then, into Transylvania, he is passed by his growing list of acquaintances and friends from one kastély to another, spending days with a learned professor discussing languages and history, borrowing a marvelous horse from a count for part of the journey across the Hungarian plain, staying for weeks with a new friend named István in Romania, and dallying with a young married woman on a motor trip with István to Prague.

Leigh Fermor does not spend all his time in such exalted circles, though. He happily camps out with gypsies, spends the night outside a shepherd’s cottage, is hosted by a Jewish family after an afternoon spent discussing the Hebrew language, sleeps in a cave, and camps on an island in the Danube near a village inhabited by resettled Turks. On his way, he describes the scenery in lyrical terms, explains the ancient history of each area he passes through, and tells us about the people he meets and the sights he sees. His chronicle is supported by the notebooks he kept and a nearly photographic memory of a remarkable journey. In addition, he tells us that he revisited some of the areas 20 years later.

This memoir is beautifully written. Although relatively unacquainted with formal learning, having abandoned military school at that early age, Leigh Fermor has an astonishing range of interests, and he tells us all about them. He is constantly plunging into dusty tomes in his hosts’ libraries but is just as ready to dance and drink the night away. This is a delightful series of books, still full of the youthful joy and enthusiasm Leigh Fermor must have felt when he was 19 and 20 years old.

In the Appendix to this book, Leigh Fermor reflects on how many of the sights he writes about in this book are now under water, for the Danube valley that he traversed and the torrents and currents that once rushed along it as well as the Iron Gates themselves have been subsumed by a huge concrete dam and hydro-electric power plant. And of course there have been other causes of destruction since 1934.

Unfortunately, The Broken Road, the unfinished manuscript of the final portion of the journey, is being republished but is not available from Amazon until March of next year! (It may be available used from some other site.) I am so disappointed to find the book never gets us all the way to Turkey but stops in Greece.