Day 184: Caleb’s Crossing

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Caleb's CrossingBest Book of the Week!

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks is a wonderful novel about life in 17th century Martha’s Vineyard and Cambridge. The novel is focused around Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first American Indian to take a degree at Harvard. It is narrated from the point of view of Bethia Mayfield, a girl whose thirst for knowledge is only slaked with great difficulty in Puritan New England.

Bethia meets Caleb when they are both twelve. She is wandering around the beaches of her home island, Noepe, later to be called Martha’s Vineyard, in a small act of rebellion because she is not supposed to be alone. She has already been halted in her education by her father, a minister and missionary to the Indians, who sees how her superior abilities humiliate her brother Makepeace.

Caleb is not one of the “praying Indians” who have adopted Christianity and moved closer to town. By all rights Bethia should avoid him. But she loves nature and is happy for Caleb to teach her about the island’s wildlife and learn his language while she teaches him English, reading, and writing. Although their relationship is perfectly innocent, it remains a secret and is naturally broken off as they grow older.

In learning more about English ways, and particularly about writing, Caleb decides he can best help his people by becoming more educated. His path continues together with Bethia’s, as a series of tragedies result in Bethia’s agreement to sacrifice herself for Makepeace’s tuition by working as an indentured servant for the teacher who is preparing Caleb, his friend Joel, and Makepeace to enter Harvard. As Caleb struggles with his adoption of the English culture, Bethia struggles with her own desires for an intellectual life in a culture that only recognizes one path for her–marriage and motherhood.

Although a few historical figures appear in the novel, little is known of Caleb and Joel–both historical figures–so the account is completely fictionalized. For example, Bethia’s father Thomas Mayfield is based on Thomas Mayhew, Jr., who did not have a daughter.

This is an enthralling novel, an evocative picture of the place and times, and Bethia and Caleb are memorable characters.

Day 183: The Greek Myths

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Greek MythsThe Greek Myths is classicist and writer Robert Graves’ well respected and unconventional translation and interpretation of a comprehensive collection of Greek myths. Graves explains that rather than interpret the myths psychologically (i.e., Oedipus), which he appears to have some disdain for, it is more useful and accurate to look at them in combination with the findings of archaeology, as a sort of historic record. Graves relates each myth, with all its variants, and then provides sometimes copious notes to explain each facet. He also points out the many similarities among world myths, showing the relationships between Greek myths and those of the Celts, Sumerians, Jews, and others.

It is Graves’ contention that most of the Greek myths with which we are familiar were manipulations and distortions by the Hellenes of the religious beliefs of the people they conquered. There were four migrations of the Hellenes into Greece. After the first two, the patriarchal Hellenes adopted the matriarchal religions of their hosts, but in the last two, the Hellenes forced the existing tribes to follow their beliefs and then consciously distorted their mythologies to reflect this change.

For example, there are many instances where Zeus chases and rapes various nymphs. In the earlier myths, the three-headed goddess in one of her forms would have been chasing the king as part of a ritual ceremony, so the myth has been turned on its head. Similarly, many a Greek hero’s exploits that involve fighting and killing an opponent are a perversion of the ritual whereby the king is “killed” by his tanist–or alternate ruler (“twin” or “son”)–at the end of his reign and then in turn actually kills the tanist to take up his reign again. Grave states, “Like Aeschylus, Euripedes was engaged in religious propaganda.”

The ideas Graves espouses are very interesting and the book is extremely well written. However, the sheer number of names and places and similar incidents can be overwhelming. Some deities or other figures go by six or eight names, for example. And there’s only so much killing and rapine a person can take. I finally bogged down over Heracles, who has more than 100 of the 600+ pages devoted to him (and whose adventures are very similar to those of Gilgamesh). Heracles, I feel, was a thug, and round about his tenth labor, which was particularly rambling, I gave up on him.

My intention in reading this work was to come out with a more coherent idea of the whole of Greek mythology, but ironically, I feel this book is too comprehensive for me to meet that goal–that something simpler would have worked better for me. However, for serious students of mythology, this is probably required and interesting reading.

Day 182: Chocolat

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for ChocolatI decided to review Chocolat today because I just started reading The Girl with No Shadow, Joanne Harris’s sequel. Even though I have always enjoyed reading Harris’s books, I didn’t read Chocolat until long after seeing the movie, perhaps because I saw it first. The movie is pleasant enough but anemic and inexplicable, and as I found later, does nothing to convey the magic of the novel.

Vianne Rocher and her six-year-old daughter Anouk blow into the small village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes with the wind. They are distinctly odd. Vianne wears red skirts with bells on them, and Anouk has an imaginary friend, a rabbit named Pantoufle, that some folks occasionally think they’ve glimpsed.

Vianne opens a chocolate shop, making her own wonderful confections. She seems to have an almost sixth sense about which chocolate will be each person’s favorite, and she creates miraculously inventive window displays for special days. She also begins befriending some of the village’s misfits.

This all sounds very pleasant, but Pére Reynaud, the local priest, hates Vianne on sight. She has opened a chocolate shop during Lent! Right across the street from the church! He begins a campaign to try to force her out of town. When Vianne plans a chocolate festival to celebrate Easter, he believes she is being sacrilegious and vows to ruin the festival.

Vianne herself has lived like a vagabond her entire life and wants to settle down. Her witch mother died on the streets of New York, and she wants her child to have a better life than hers has been.

The novel is colorful and teems with eccentric characters, as well as lovely descriptions of food. It is beautifully written. As I read it, I was able to understand why the book is so beloved.

Day 181: Clara and Mr. Tiffany

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Clara and Mr. TiffanySusan Vreeland’s Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a novel about Clara Driscoll, a real artist who headed a woman’s workshop designing the most complex lamps and screens for Louis Comfort Tiffany. The novel details the ups and downs of a long professional relationship, including Driscoll’s frustration at not being recognized as the designer of some of Tiffany’s most famous pieces. A lot of the interest in the novel resides in the tension between the women’s division and the men’s division, which was only allowed to work on the more mundane pieces.

Right now I am reading some of Vreeland’s own comments about the captivating woman she found depicted in Clara’s own letters. Unfortunately for the novel, Vreeland does not do a great job of making her characters interesting in this book or of conveying the woman she found in those letters. Several important but minor characters are so undefined that I couldn’t keep them straight.

I believe that Vreeland is hindered rather than helped by the fact that she is fictionalizing the lives of real people whose relatives are probably still alive. She has written more successful books about artists who lived farther in the past–Monet in Luncheon of the Boating Party and Artemisia Gentileschi in The Passion of Artemesia, for example. There are certainly interesting aspects to the story–Driscoll had an unusual life featuring at least one bizarre event–but the novel is written more like a series of incidents than a narrative with an arc.

Day 180: The Beautiful Mystery

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for The Beautiful MysteryHundreds of years ago, a small order of monks travelled across the ocean from Europe to Canada and hid itself in the wilderness of Quebec away from the Inquisition. There they remained hidden until two years before the beginning of The Beautiful Mystery, when an inferior compact disk of stunningly beautiful Gregorian chants appeared and became popular worldwide. Reporters eventually traced the origins of the CD back to the remote monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups. Pilgrimages to the monastery began, but no one was admitted. At the beginning of Louise Penny’s latest novel, two men, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, arrive at the monastery and they are admitted. They have been summoned to investigate the murder of the monastery’s prior.

Gamache and Beauvoir soon discover that there is a serious rift among the monks, between the men who agree with the dead prior that the monastery should make another CD so it can pay for badly needed repairs and the men who believe the CD has ruined their peace. But it is much more difficult to determine who murdered the prior, who was also the choir conductor. A critical piece of evidence may be a scrap of paper the prior was clutching when he died, which contains neumes–the precursors to musical notation that indicate the rise and fall of the chants–and nonsense syllables in Latin.

Gamache’s and Beauvoir’s work is interrupted by the arrival of their superior, Superintendent Francoeur, a man who hates Gamache and is determined to destroy him. Soon it becomes obvious that his intent is to drive a wedge between Gamache and Beauvoir.

As always with Penny, the mystery is atmospheric and absorbing. I haven’t been happy lately, though, with the direction she has been taking Beauvoir.

Day 179: Shadow Tag

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Shadow TagWhen Irene America takes out her diary one day, she realizes that her husband Gil has been reading it. She is outraged, so she starts another diary, a true one, which she keeps in a safe deposit box at the bank. In her original diary, she begins inserting falsehoods to torment Gil. The disintegration of their marriage is the plot of the disturbing Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich.

Irene wants to leave Gil. He is manipulative and abusive to her and their three children. His moods are mercurial–even the dogs are wary of him. He is obsessively jealous, to the point of resenting the attention Irene gives their children.

Irene is not perfect either. She drinks too much and resorts to subterfuge and manipulation. She is alternately endeared and repelled by Gil’s attempts to win her back.

Gil is a successful Native American artist who has painted only Irene for years, but now she finds his depictions of her degrading. Still, she doesn’t have the courage to leave him, which will have fateful results. The tension in the novel builds to a surprising and tragic finish.

A detached omniscient narrator alternates telling the story with the two diaries written by Irene. You do not find out who the omniscient narrator is until the last chapter.

I can’t help but wonder how much of this psychological novel is a fictionalized account of Erdrich’s marriage to Michael Dorris. I see now that a review in the Washington Post agrees. If so, it is a masterly and brave work of self-exposure that faithfully shows the unpredictability of marital relationships. It is extremely well written and very sad. If you require likeable characters in your fiction, you won’t find them here, however.

Day 178: Borkmann’s Point

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Borkmann's PointI don’t know what tipped me off about the murderer in Håkan Nesser’s Borkmann’s Point, but I guessed the result early on. I do not think the solution was obvious, though.

Inspector Van Veeteren interrupts his vacation to help find a murderer who has killed two people with an ax in the small coastal town of Kaalbringen. There don’t seem to be any links between the victims except that they recently moved to Kaalbringen, and the police aren’t finding any leads, so Van Veeteren occupies his time playing chess with the retiring police chief. Then, another man is murdered.

Some scenes in this police procedural are written from the murderer’s point of view, a technique that could be hackneyed but works fairly well here. The writing is taut, and the pace, although not rapid, keeps you engaged. I have commented before on the pace of some Swedish police procedurals, thinking it is more realistic than that employed in American mysteries but can flag. I did not have that complaint about this novel, however.

I thought the novel is more involving than some of the Swedish mysteries I have read but not as involving as others. I believe an opportunity was missed, though, in that more could have been done with the setting in a seaside town.

Day 177: Below Stairs

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for Below StairsThis is actually my posting from yesterday. We were having some internet problems.

Below Stairs is the memoir of a kitchen maid that inspired the series Upstairs, Downstairs. Margaret Powell worked in service in the 1920’s from the age of 15 until her marriage. She was an intelligent girl who could have been a teacher, but her parents couldn’t afford to support her while she qualified, so she left school and began working at 13. Later, after her sons were grown, she went back to school and passed her 0-levels at the age of 58, followed by her A-levels.

Powell began as a kitchen maid and worked her way up to cook, mostly through ambition and nerve because she never really received any cooking training. (You had to feel sorry for the first employer who hired her as a cook, because she admits she only knew how to cook vegetables!) Her memoir describes the conditions the servants worked and lived in, sometimes very bad; the work she had to do, including ironing shoe laces in one position; and the way she resented how servants were treated by many of her employers. Although Powell wanted to become a cook, as it was the most privileged job available to her, her biggest ambition was to be married so that she could leave the life of servitude.

The memoir is written in a conversational style, including quite a bit of scathing commentary. It is an interesting book, although Powell’s memories are mostly negative. She says that she had fun, but she only slightly mentions any amusements, focusing on the numerous snubs she received and the ridiculous things she was expected to do. Of course, this adds to the interest of the narrative. One employer was actually even a bit miffed at Powell’s own name (Margaret Langley at the time), deeming it too “posh” for a servant. Although the memoir is written at least 40 years after Powell worked in service, the experience still obviously rankles.

Day 176: Queens’ Play

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for Queen's PlayBest Book of the Week!

Queens’ Play is the second book of Dorothy Dunnett’s excellent historical fiction series, the Lymond Chronicles. Although it is not absolutely necessary to read the first book, Game of Kings, you will enjoy the other books more if you do. If you decide to continue this series, it is important to read them in order after this one.

Francis Crawford of Lymond enters the scene disguised, and it is some time before we figure out which of two characters he is. Francis has been asked by Mary de Guise, Queen Dowager of Scotland and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, to travel to France and protect Mary. Although Mary is still a little girl, plots revolve around her, and her mother is afraid her life is at risk.

The Irish prince Phelim O’Liam Roe’s arrival into France is a spectacular one, as his ship almost crashes into another one when entering the harbor. This incident is perhaps not an accident, as evidence mounts that someone is trying to kill the prince. To the French court, O’Liam Roe is unbelievably provincial, and he is immediately the butt of ridicule. He is attracted to Oonagh O’Dwyer, an Irish woman living on the borders of society, but she disdains him. In fact, she is the mistress of the Irish rebel Cormac O’Connor.

O’Liam Roe has brought with him Thady Boy Ballagh, an ollav, or trained master poet. Untidy, fat Thady Boy is gaining popularity with the decadent French court through a series of reckless deeds and his brilliant musical performances.

It seems that the Queen Dowager’s fears are correct. During a hunt that employs the king’s leopards as hunting animals, someone lets Mary’s pet hare out in front of the cat near her pony. As she struggles to save her pet, the cat turns its sights on Mary.

As always, Dunnett combines heart-stopping action and suspense with a detailed knowledge of the period. This book begins some of the plot threads that will continue throughout the series.