Review 2638: #1925Club! #HYH25! The Informer

~ whatmeread ~ 13 Comments

Twice a year, Simon of Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings host a year club, and this October the year is 1925. For this club, participants read a few books from that year and all post their reviews on the same week. Just by coincidence, this year the books also qualify for Neeru’s Hundred Years Hence Club.

Previous Books from 1925

As usual for my first post for the year club, I’ll start out by listing books I have already read for that year with links to my reviews, if I read them while blogging:

My Review

I picked The Informer for the 1925 Club without knowing anything about it or about Liam O’Flaherty. It was a winner of the James Tait Black award, written in the style of Naturalism and set after the Irish Civil War.

Francis Joseph McPhillip is a wanted man. He was a member of the Revolutionary Organization when he murdered the president of the Farmer’s Union during a strike. He and his friend, Gypo Nolan, were booted out of the Organization as a result, and Frankie has been on the run with a price on his head. But he has become tired of running and has returned to Dublin. The first thing he does is search out Gypo to ask if his parents’ house is being watched, and then he goes home.

Gypo is a brute—huge, strong, ugly, and very stupid. He has always done what Frankie told him to do. But ever since he got thrown out of the Organization, he can’t get work. He has no home, and no one will help him. He doesn’t have anywhere to sleep that night. He gets an idea. If he turns Frankie in to the police, he’ll have the reward money. So, he does.

The word is soon out that Frankie is dead, shot by the police at his parents’ home. Being an idiot, Gypo is running around town spending money on liquor and women. He just manages to come up with a story that he robbed an American sailor.

Even as an ex-member of the Organization, Frankie is still in its sights, as it is clear someone informed against him. Commandant Dan Gallagher is already looking at Gypo, because Frankie told his parents he had seen Gypo. Gypo is not very good at thinking, but he makes up a story that he saw Rat Mulligan skulking after Frankie in the street. But Rat has an alibi.

Naturalism isn’t my thing, and true to the literary movement, many of these characters are the dregs of society. It’s hard to empathize with a stupid fool who turns in his friend for a few bucks. Other characters are mostly street people—hookers, addicts, and so on—and those in the Organization who have a philosophy spit out half-digested rhetoric. Also, the ending of the book is over the top. A powerful book in its time, but not my thing.

Related Posts

Troubles

Last September

The Islandman

Review 2637: The Manticore

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

The Manticore is the second volume in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The trilogy itself is about the ramifications through several people’s lives of one malicious act—a snowball with a rock in it thrown by Boy Staunton at Dunstan Ramsey when they were children.

Davies takes up this story again in The Manticore with the next generation, specifically David Staunton, Boy’s son. At the end of Fifth Business, Boy was found dead, having apparently driven himself off the end of a pier, but oddly found with a stone in his mouth. David is a successful, much-feared criminal attorney, but he realizes he drinks too much when he finds himself shouting during a magic show, “Who killed Boy Staunton?” This scene has all kinds of ramifications that David himself doesn’t know about but we do, because we learned in the previous book that the magician, Magnus Eisengrim, was the self-reinvented baby who was prematurely born after the throwing of that stone and may somehow be responsible for Boy’s death.

Davies uses the device of having David seek therapy to develop the story more, in particular what a horrible father Boy was despite David’s continued regard for him. (In fact, it’s fairly clear that Boy was a horrible person in many respects, despite the general respect for his wealth and accomplishments.) In this way, David is an unreliable narrator because there are so many things he doesn’t understand that others, including the readers, do.

To keep his therapy a secret, David goes to Switzerland and seeks the help of Jungian psychiatrist Dr. Johanna van Hallen. This therapy begins on page 7 and lasts for most of the book, so David tells story after story and Dr. van Hallen talks him through therapy. I have no idea if these discussions truly reflect Jungian therapy or if the therapist would indeed go into discussions of archetypes and so on, but the stories were far more interesting than the revelations of Jungian techniques.

The ending of this book I found a little too symbolic and fantastic—in a mild way. I’m not sure how I feel about this book overall.

Related Posts

Fifth Business

The Northern Lights

The Bird Artist

Classics Club Spin #42

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. To participate, post a numbered list of 20 books from your Classics Club list (here’s mine) before Sunday, October 19. Classics Club will announce a number on that day, and that determines the book to read before the 21st of December.

I no longer have 20 books left on my list, although I have neglected it shamefully, so I have to repeat titles. In fact, I have exactly 10 books left to read. Here’s my list for this spin:

  1. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  4. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  5. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  6. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  7. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  8. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  9. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  10. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  11. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  12. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  13. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  14. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  15. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  16. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  17. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  18. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  19. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  20. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini

Good luck to everyone! I hope you get a book you enjoy.

Review 2636: The Art Thief

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments

The Art Thief is a nonfiction book about the most prolific art thief ever known. Stéphan Breitwieser, aided by his girlfriend Ann-Catherine Kleinklaus, stole hundreds, maybe thousands of paintings and objets d’art while only in his 20s.

Breitwieser was a young man who grew up wealthy and spoiled by his mother until a traumatic divorce that broke with his father and left him and his mother quite poor. Not that he went out and got a job. Instead, he lived with his mother, received some money from his father, and was supported by the state.

He loved the beautiful things that filled his father’s house, though, and he read extensively about art and antiques, becoming very knowledgeable. Then one day while visiting a museum, he swiped a lovely ivory statue of Adam and Eve. It was easy.

Breitwieser seemed compelled to steal these beautiful things, not to sell them but to decorate his two attic rooms and to be admired and touched. Kleinklaus participated in his thefts—it seems, because she won’t talk about it—mostly to keep him from doing something reckless.

This is a fascinating story of obsession gone wrong. It manages to build a fair amount of suspense along the way and is written in more of a novelistic style.

One thing that disturbed me slightly was a hint of not exactly admiration but in any case just a bit of the kind of attention that fuels some people to do heinous acts. I say this despite the book’s deprecations of Breitwieser’s actions. It particularly grated when I learned what became of the more fragile items in his collection once he was caught.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting true crime book.

Related Posts

The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

The Collector’s Apprentice

Review 2635: #RIPXX: The Bookseller of Inverness

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Iain MacGillivray was badly injured at Culloden and shipped off to work in indentured servitude in the Americas. In 1752, six years later, he is back and running a bookshop in Inverness. The town is full of British soldiers.

One evening he sees a grubby man who looks vaguely familiar looking through some books that came from Lord Lovat’s estate. It’s closing time, so he forces him out.

Iain hasn’t seen his father, Hector MacGillivray, for years. Hector has been serving King James in France and Italy. He is proscribed, but Iain has believed his father is dead. Now he finds he is in town.

Hector is searching for a book that has been rumored to exist, one that contains a list of traitors to the Jacobite cause. King James is planning another attempt to take back the throne from the Hanoverian king, and they want to make sure they know it’s not going to be betrayed.

By looking through the remaining books from Lord Lovat, they figure out which book it was. Hearing that there is a copy, Iain goes to Lovat’s castle, now occupied by British soldiers, on the pretext of buying some of the books. There he has an unpleasant encounter with the cruel Captain Dunne, who burns part of the book, but Iain is able to get away with the rest.

Hector starts trying to decode the text for names, but before he figures out each of six names, that person is murdered. The killer could be someone getting revenge, or it could be a traitor trying to cover his back.

I found this to be an interesting, fast-moving adventure that seems well researched and steeped in its time. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Related Posts

Kidnapped

Corrag

Waverley

Review 2634: Restless Dolly Maunder

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I’ve enjoyed a couple of books by Kate Grenville, but Restless Dolly Maunder seemed different, written in a stripped-down style and very matter of fact. It wasn’t until I got to the end that I realized Grenville was writing about her own grandmother. That explained things to me, because I’ve noticed the tendency in some historical fiction writers to be a little too careful when writing about people who actually lived, afraid to take liberties, maybe (while other have no trouble telling outright lies).

Dolly is born in 1831 to a hard-working farmer and a mother who married down and seems to be disappointed about it. Although Dolly is the baby of the family, she doesn’t feel any particular affection from anyone. She is very intelligent and plans to become a teacher, but her father has been waiting for her to reach the legal age to quit school, 14, as he sees no benefit in educating girls. Soon, she has to face up to the fact that if she doesn’t marry, she’ll be a spinster stuck on her father’s farm all her life.

Twice she thinks she’ll be asked by men she cares about, but she is not because she’s not Catholic in one instance or from a good enough family in the other. She waits a long time, but finally settles on Bert Russell, her only choice, really, a pleasant, outgoing handsome man whom she doesn’t really like, but he’s a hard worker.

Her anger about her lack of options follows her throughout her life, affecting her relationships with other people. It is intensified when she learns a few months after the wedding that Bert had a daughter out of wedlock with her family’s servant girl while he was courting her and that her family had to have known it.

Dolly stays with Bert, but it is her ideas that take the couple off the sheep farm and from one opportunity to another, amassing money as they go. This novel follows her through World War I, the Depression, and World War II.

I liked this novel well enough, but the entire time I was reading it, I felt as if it was the bones of a longer, more satisfying novel. We don’t really get to know any of the characters except Dolly, for example. Once I understood this was about a real person, I realized that Grenville didn’t want to play loose with her family history.

Related Posts

A Room Made of Leaves

The Secret River

Salt Creek

Novellas in November: Planning Post

~ whatmeread ~ 31 Comments

In a month, Novellas in November is starting up again, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Beck of Bookish Beck. Last year, I think I just plunged into Novellas in November by reading a bunch of novellas, but this year, I see Beck has already launched a Linky for planning posts. (Maybe they did this last year, too, and I just didn’t notice.) So, here I am throwing together a planning post.

I tend to read well before I publish unless something unexpected comes up, so I have already started reading for this event. Aside from a general post about what novellas I’ve read through the year, I have so far read two novellas that I will review in November, and I plan to read five more.

Here are the ones I have finished with a brief description:

  • The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym: a woman of a certain age becomes a little too close with a much younger man.
  • Seascraper by Benjamin Wood: a young man is the only person left carrying on a traditional way of shrimping when he meets a film maker.

The novellas I haven’t read yet but plan to review in November are

  • The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka: in the early 19th century, a group of women are brought from Japan as “picture brides.”
  • For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie: two women meet in 1413 Norwich, one of whom has visions considered heretical.
  • Hex by Jenni Fagan: In 1591, Geillis Duncan, a convicted witch, receives a visit from a mysterious woman.
  • A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro: a Japanese woman relives the events at the end of World War II.
  • Why Did I Ever by Mary Robinson: a woman is barely keeping it under control in this dark comedy.

Review 2633: The Pink House

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Some of the best stories of my life begin with an orphaned child. Here is another one.

Norah is a crippled girl, probably from polio, but at seven she is loved and taken care of. Then her mother dies, and her father, who soon will be traveling to South America for business, gets Aunt Rose to take her home. Norah, who doesn’t even understand that her mother is dead, thinks she is going for a visit. And it’s clear right away that no one wants her at her aunt’s home in central New York State.

Aunt Rose is beautiful, but she is cold and aloof. Nevertheless, she makes people love her. She lives a life of barely hidden dislike with Uncle John, yet he loves her. The children are Paul, who tries to please Rose but never does; Mary Anne, who is so beautiful that Norah can’t help staring at her; Jed, who calls Norah “Toad”; and Dosie, who comes right out and tells Norah she doesn’t like her. The children make it clear they aren’t interested in her, and only Paul is kind but removed. Aunt Poll, John’s sister, is so direct that Norah at first hates her, but it is Poll who will help her become strong, independent, and brave. At first, though, she spends most of her time alone crying.

This is a story about how a lonely, neglected orphan slowly becomes an integral and valued member of the family. But it is also about a cold, selfish, beautiful woman who attracts love without effort and without deserving it and does her best to destroy that family. It is about self-determination and growth but also about family secrets.

I absolutely loved this novel and thank the brand new imprint, Quite Literally Books, for sending me the book in exchange for a free and fair review. The first thing I did after I finished this book was look for another one by Nelia Gardner White, a new name to me.

Related Posts

Anne of Green Gables

Mansfield Park

David Copperfield

Review 2632: #ReadingAusten25! Northanger Abbey

~ whatmeread ~ 18 Comments

Northanger Abbey is, of course, partially Jane Austen’s spoof of Gothic novels, and her heroine, Catherine Morland, is definitely a fan of them. But before that story line kicks in, Catherine gets to visit Bath in the company of family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allen.

Catherine is not a well-informed girl and tends to be naïve and to take people as they present themselves. The first few days at Bath go slowly, because the Allens don’t know anyone. Catherine, however, has a dance with Henry Tilney and is inclined to like him. Then Mrs. Allen meets an old school friend, Mrs. Thorpe, and Catherine immediately becomes bosom pals with Isabella Thorpe.

It seems that Catherine’s brother James is friends with Isabella’s brother John, and Isabella has set her sights on James. Despite the vaunted friendship, Isabella and John (who is obnoxious enough that even Catherine notices it) do a great deal to disrupt Catherine’s growing acquaintance with Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor in favor of foursomes with them.

Finally, Catherine is invited to stay with Eleanor and delighted to learn the Tilneys own an old abbey. Unfortunately, Catherine lets her taste for Gothic literature carry her away.

Catherine is one of Austen’s most serious heroines, trying to navigate society and do what is right but fallen in with people whose intentions aren’t as honorable. But she is adorable, and her naïve reactions are amusing. Henry is genuinely witty and just the man to teach her to examine her assumptions a little more thoroughly. All in all, this is one of the lightest and most fun of Austen’s works.

Related Posts

Pride and Prejudice

Mansfield Park

Sense and Sensibility

Review 2631: Instead of the Thorn

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

I’m on my second of three recently discovered (by me, anyway) Georgette Heyer books, and I’m beginning to think there’s a reason they’re not well known. Although the print-on-demand book I purchased has astonishingly few errors, it also contains absolutely no publication information, not even the name of the POD company. But I see that Instead of the Thorn was published in 1924. It is one of Heyer’s few contemporary novels that aren’t mysteries.

Elizabeth Arden is brought up by her Aunt Anne, a Victorian spinster who disapproves of everything modern and has taught Elizabeth to bury her own feelings and always be agreeable. Her father doesn’t pay attention to her, and when his old friend Mr. Hengist warns him that Anne may not be the best person to raise his daughter, he thinks that’s ridiculous.

When Elizabeth reaches her older teens, she is old-fashioned but beautiful (and probably doesn’t dress like the girl on the cover above). Her father begins to take an interest, and soon she is attending parties and dances.

She meets Stephen Ramsey, a famous author who is about 10 years older, and he falls in love with her. She likes him and finally agrees to marry him, hoping for a long engagement. But it is not to be, and three months later, knowing absolutely nothing about what to expect, she marries him.

Elizabeth is young for her age, and she has been raised to be a prig. She is shocked by what marriage entails, and so she begins finding fault with Stephen’s habits and so on. Eventually, they split.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, their problems are all Elizabeth’s fault (except for how their marriage got its start, which is blamed on Aunt Anne). Aside from being messy, unpunctual, and intellectual, Stephen is perfect. Elizabeth has a long, perhaps unlikely way to go.

There are some hints of a sense of humor here, but not many. One scene between Elizabeth’s father and his sister is quite funny, and Stephen’s mother is a fun but lovable character. I guess I should give this book points for showing the harm that can occur by not telling girls the facts of life—but that problem was probably much more prevalent at that time.

Stephen’s family and friends are so much more interesting than her own that you’d think Elizabeth would go over to them immediately, but she is too much of a prig. She becomes quite unlikable for a while.

It’s clear that Heyer was still finding her feet as a novelist as well as her genre. This is not it. I will give Heyer some credit, because she does seem to be trying to capture the clash between the Victorian and Edwardian generations in both this book and Helen.

Related Posts

Helen

Arabella

Behold, Here’s Poison