Tag: 19th century

Review 2702: Pontoppidan Review-along! A Fortunate Man

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Yes, here it is, time for the Pontoppidan Review-along. Join me and FictionFan and post your own review or leave comments! FictionFan and I decided to read A Fortunate Man, but others of you may have chosen some other work by Pontoppidan.

A Fortunate Man is considered the most important work by Danish Nobelist Henrik Pontoppidan. It is an ambitious work that attempts to capture all the ideas and events affecting Danish life in the mid to late 19th century, and it is also considered to be quite autobiographical. The tensions between the new industrialism and accompanying modern ideas and traditional views of religion is one of the many themes of this novel.

Per Sidenius grows up in rural Jutland in a household dominated by a strict and self-righteous father—a Lutheran vicar. Per is a high-spirited boy, and his father and entire family treat him as if his boyish antics are paving the way to hell. His mother has been bedridden as long as he can remember. Per does not feel as if he belongs there.

This upbringing results in a young man who can’t wait to leave his home and deny all of his father’s religious beliefs. He wants to be an engineer, so his father finds the money—they are poor—to send him to technical school in Copenhagen. But Per is an arrogant youth determined to make his way, and he finds school a waste of time. Instead, he reads voluminously and starts working on a massive project. The growth of Denmark has been stunted since the country lost territory to Germany in the war of 1864. Per feels that Denmark has become a backwater, especially technologically, with its prominent citizens only protecting the status quo. He conceives of a plan to reopen the many waterways that used to cross the Jutland Peninsula, beginning with a freeport in the East, with the idea of revitalizing the entire area. (His dream of lining this waterway with warehouses and factories doesn’t exactly suit our modern sensibilities, but this was the Industrial Revolution.) But he is an unknown very young man with no backing or credentials. Once he finishes his plans, he finds he’s not getting anywhere. And he needs money just to live.

Per falls in with the Salomons, a family of wealthy Jews. He thinks perhaps his problems will be solved by marriage to one of their daughters and is extremely attracted to the younger one, Nanny. However, as he gets to know them, he realizes he cares for the older sister, Jakobe, a much more intelligent and cultured girl. He is also attracted at first by the family’s relaxed and hospitable approach to life. (Later, though, he starts being embarrassed by their outgoing manners and love of show, so beware, this novel contains lots of anti-Semitism. Even Per, engaged to a Jewish girl, tends to stereotype them, as in general, there is a lot of stereotyping of people of various nationalities and groups like Danish farmers, too.)

At first, Jakobe doesn’t like Per, but he is persistent and wins her over so that eventually her parents reluctantly betroth her to Per. Although Jakobe’s brother Ivan works hard to promote Per’s plan and try to line up backers, Per himself is condescending and rude to the money men (they’re a bunch of money-grubbers, he thinks!) and seems to lose interest in the project. Instead, he goes off traveling, supposedly to study but seeming to do little of that (all the while being supported by Mr. Salomon).

Per feels he is never at home anywhere. His father dies, and this death affects him by having him begin to obsess about and eventually re-embrace Christianity, just not the bleak one his father represented. And frankly, he treats Jakobe shamelessly, just before they are supposed to be married.

Pontoppidan is a Realist writer, and I often think that the Realists spend too much time on the negatives of human behavior. Almost up to here, I was rooting for Per, but when he starts delving into religion and we have to read excerpts from religious philosophies and endless ruminations by Per, I lost most of my interest (religion is a black hole to me), and frankly I felt that his behavior from there to the end was even more self-serving than before. In a quest for self-realization, which sounds laudable, I felt as if he would decide what he wanted to do and then find self-justifications for his actions.

Spoilers ahead! There is a scene where he’s basically unloading his family (he feels it would be “best” for them), and first he tells his religious wife that he doesn’t believe in God (is he lying?) and then lies to her that on a business trip to Copenhagen he met another woman, so it will be “easier” for her to split from him. She’ll understand that. (Of course, she’s a simpleton who doesn’t understand anything, at least not according to him.) When she leaves in anger, he looks up to heaven and asks if that was the right sacrifice. Doesn’t believe in God? His sacrifice? He just wants to be free and has found a way to do it. I ended up hating this guy. And then there’s the letter he gets from her years later thanking him for doing the right thing. Sure. I totally buy that.

I really enjoyed Pontoppidan’s The White Bear and about a half to three quarters of this novel. But at some point, I began to feel as if I had been reading it forever. The rest of the novel made me at first bored and then angry. I suspect from reading Pontoppidan’s Wikipedia page that this novel is at least partly biographical. If it is, he wasn’t a very nice man.

A very slight issue. I’m not sure how New York Review Books prepares its reprints and whether machine reading is involved, but usually their editions are immaculate. In this one, though, I spotted three confusions of homonyms in the first 100 or so pages. Interestingly, two of them were the reverse confusion of “bear” and “bare.” That is, in one instance “bare” should have been used but “bear” was, and in the other, the reverse. (One might have been “bear-faced.” I can’t remember.) I couldn’t tell if this was a machine-reading error not detected by an editor, an editing error, or a translation error.

Check out other reviews of Pontoppidan’s books for this event here. I’ll add them as I become aware of them:

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Review 2698: Edenglassie

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I’ve been on the lookout lately for books written by indigenous authors, so when I saw this book reviewed, I was intrigued. It’s set in Brisbane, Australia, in two time periods: 1840-55 and 2024.

In 2024, Eddie Blanket, an elderly Aboriginal woman, falls and injures herself in front of the Maritime Museum. In the hospital, she is treated by Doctor Johnny Newman. When he meets Eddie’s granddaughter, Winona, a feisty activist, he falls instantly in love. But to Winona, he looks too white. Though he claims to have Aboriginal ancestors, to marry her he must establish that they’re not related and also break down her prejudices.

In 1840-55, a young Aboriginal man, Mulanyin, is growing up south of Brisbane and watching its changes, with the incoming of more and more whites, in dismay. He decides he wants to own a whale boat, so he goes to work for Tom Petrie, an unusual young man from a prominent white family who seems to have spent time learning about the Aboriginal culture and learning the language. At the home of Tom’s parents, Mulanyin meets Nita, a servant of Mrs. Petrie who was rescued from traffickers as a little girl by Tom’s father. He falls in love with her.

But the couple live in difficult times, in which the Aboriginal people can be killed with impunity and massacres of whose families take place.

Although I found the subject matter of this novel interesting, especially because I know little of Australian history, I didn’t really get involved with any of these characters. It also took a long time to link the two stories, although the linkage could be partially guessed at. There was frequent use of slang Australian or maybe Aboriginal expressions and words—no glossary—and sometimes the implications of the dialogue weren’t clear to me even if I understood what was said.

That being said, I was very interested in the beliefs and mindset of the people, and I found the ending touching.

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Review 2696: Murder in Constantinople

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If you want a historical novel that reflects careful research and knowledge of the period, this isn’t it. If you want a novel with a believable plot, this isn’t it. If you want an old-fashioned adventure story, this might be closer.

In 1854 London, Ben Canaan is a Jewish tailor’s son on his way to becoming a nogoodnik. He was a scholar who wanted an academic career, but his father took him out of school to work in the family shop. On the day we meet him, he takes some clothes he is supposed to be delivering, and he and his friends wear them to an elite ball, where he pretends to be a Duke’s son. But he is discovered by the Duke’s son, and in the resulting struggle, a gun he is carrying goes off. He becomes a wanted man.

Before that, though, he helped his father measure Lord Palmerston for a suit. In his pocket, he found a photograph with a familiar face—his lover, who he believed dead, in front of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople with a cryptic message beneath. Since he has to leave town anyway, he persuades the criminal kingpin he does errands for to send him to Constantinople. He departs on a military ship on its way to the Crimean War, serving as a common sailor.

I had immediate problems with historical accuracy when he sashays up to a beautiful girl at the ball and introduces himself under his assumed name, then asks her to dance and she does. At this time, she wouldn’t have spoken or danced with him without an introduction. And where, exactly, is he supposed to have carried on his affair with his lover? He’s a very young man, basically just jerked out of college.

I have to tell myself just to judge the novel on its own terms, as an adventure. In that respect, it certainly shows some flights of fancy with its brash, very young man managing to work his way into the upper echelons of society and get involved in political intrigue.

I was very interested to find that in 19th century Turkey, almost everyone speaks English, including Kurdish street urchins and women who live in the Sultan’s harem. (You can see I’m being facetious here.)

The dialogue is supposed to be witty, but I found it cumbersome.

Judged purely as an adventure story, I still found it a bit meh.

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Review 2689: Jane Austen in 41 Objects

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Oxford historian Kathryn Sutherland has provided an unusual glimpse of Jane Austen in Jane Austen in 41 Objects. It of course explores how little we know of Jane Austen, even to not having a proper portrait of her. In the book, Sutherland assembles 41 objects that have some connection to Austen and discusses each object and its relevance. These objects extend from things she actually touched or owned, like the table she wrote at, her pelisse, or a lock of her hair, to contemporary items such as the check stub of her publisher showing a payment, a silhouette of her mother made in honor of her birth, to more modern objects such as Colin Firth’s “wet” shirt or illustrations of costumes from the first stage production of Pride and Prejudice. Some of them are touching.

The Introduction to the book is scholarly and sometimes opaque. I was hoping as I read it that the body of the book wasn’t like that, and it was not. It was very readable except for a few sentences in the last chapter that get a little esoteric.

The format of each short chapter is to show the photo of the object, tell what is known about it, and in the last paragraph quickly describe its provenance and where it is located now.

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Review 2681: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth

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A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth is a collection of short stories that I read for my Pulitzer Prize project. I sometimes have problems reading short stories, but I found most of these engrossing. Most of them were about scientific curiosity and the characters’ actual or potential legacy.

“Death of the Pugilist, or the Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw” is set during the early 19th century. It is about how a burly lad becomes a prize fighter. These were the days of no-holds-barred bare-knuckle fights.

Another historical story, “The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace,” is about an early collector of bug specimens who begins to draw conclusions similar to Darwin’s about the survival of the fittest. He writes to Darwin hoping for a scholarly exchange, but perhaps Darwin is worried about which of them thought of the theory first. This one has really beautiful prose.

“For the Union Dead” is a contemporary story about the narrator’s uncle, who became involved in Civil War re-enactments.

“The Second Doctor Service” is a letter to a medical journal from a 19th century man who begins having periods of blackouts and thinks another self is trying to take him over.

“The Miraculous Discovery of Psammetichus I” is based on a story by Herodotus. It’s a series of descriptions of experiments supposedly performed by a curious Pharoah, most of which involve having children raised by animals.

“On Growing Ferns and Other Plants in Glass Cases, in the Midst of the Smoke of London” is set in the 19th century during the height of the industrial revolution and major air pollution. A widow’s young son begins suffering from severe asthma, and the doctors fail to treat it successfully. She eventually gets a better idea.

“The Line Agent Pascal” is set in the 19th century South American jungle. Pascal is a telegraph operator who likes the isolation of his position but forms a sort of family with the other operators. There is one in particular whom he has never met but for whom he feels an affinity.

“On the Cause of Winds and Waves, &c” is a letter to her sister by a 19th century balloonist in France. Observing a strange phenomenon in the heavens, she is asked to report about it to the scientific Académie, but she doesn’t realize she has only been asked to be ridiculed.

“A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth” is a record by a man who has been incarcerated in an insane asylum but is probably OCD or on the spectrum instead of insane.

Most of these stories have some kind of uplifting ending. Maybe I enjoyed them so much because many of them felt like short historical novels. I liked them a lot.

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Review 2672: Night Watch

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This novel begins in 1874 with ConaLee, a thirteen-year-old girl in a wagon with her mother and a man she calls Papa. Her mother had twins three months before and has not been able to care for herself since, nor does she speak. On the journey, Papa tells ConaLee that he is not her father, that he has given away his children by her mother and sold everything. He is taking her mother to an asylum, where she is to say her mother is called Miss Janet and she is her servant. He drops them off at the gate and goes on, and they do what he tells them, only her mother soon begins to speak and care for herself.

Returning to 1864, we follow ConaLee’s father, a Union sharpshooter in the Civil War. He has hidden his family, his pregnant wife Eliza and the woman he considers his mother, Dearhbla, as high up on the West Virginia ridges as he can, hoping to keep them out of the war. He has been gone three years, but in the Wilderness battle, he is injured so badly by an explosion that he loses an eye and part of his brain—and his memory. Thus, when the war ends, he does not return home. And his family is left prey to Papa.

This novel contains quite a few mighty coincidences. One that gives nothing away is that Dearhbla, an Irish wise woman with second sight, travels to the hospital in Alexandria because she knows her son is there. They will not let her in because of an epidemic, so she gives the name he took when he went to war—for all of them are fugitives. But no one of that name is there, so she leaves. All the while, he is watching her from the window, with no idea that he knows her.

Despite the coincidences, I found this novel absolutely enthralling. It captures the chaos during and after war, the fear that doesn’t stop just because the war does. It is altogether a compelling story. I read it for my Pulitzer Prize project.

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Review 2667: Dean Street December! Cecil

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Through about 20 years’ time, Lady Anne Guthrie becomes more and more concerned about the relationship between her husband’s much younger stepbrother, Cecil, and Cecil’s mother, Lady Guthrie. Anne’s husband Charlie was already an adult when his elderly father married Edythe, who was very young. They had only one child, and Lady Guthrie, who plays the invalid card, does everything to keep her son with her, saying he is too nervous to be sent to school, keeping him out of university, and opposing his proposed career as a diplomat. This novel is set in the late 19th century, seemingly for no apparent reason, perhaps because the events later in the novel are more believable then.

Anne, who finds Lady Guthrie tiresome, thinks her decisions are misguided, but Charlie’s cousin Nealie thinks Edythe is more selfish than misguided. As Cecil grows to an adult, it becomes obvious that his mother will do anything to prevent his marriage, but Cecil sees only the sacrifice she has made to live with his frequently ill father and raise him virtually on her own.

Charlie and Anne try to help Cecil, whom they are fond of, but the events of the novel become darker as it proceeds. This is a terrific character study of a “delicate” woman who uses her health and close relationship with her son to manipulate him. I found it very involving.

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Review 2648: #ReadingAusten25! Persuasion

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Persuasion is a reread and re-review for me, and I see that my original post works just as well as it did before for a general review. So, I was trying to think of a topic I could discuss, and I decided to focus on its villains.

Maybe “villains” is too strong a word for this novel. The only outright villain in Austen that I can think of now is Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. But certainly Austen’s work features selfish people, people who wish ill to others, and even people who actively work against others. It strikes me that, although many of these characters are comic, they are less comic as she goes on. Is it my imagination, or are there also more of them?

First, there’s Anne Elliot’s entire family. Her father and sister Elizabeth are cold and snobbish and care only for appearances. Neither of them thinks Anne is of any account. And Sir Walter Elliot holds this high opinion of himself despite his having recklessly outspent his income, he and his daughter refusing to retrench where it might lessen their consequence. Above all, Sir Walter felt that Frederick Wentworth was beneath Anne when she fell in love with him seven years ago.

Anne’s sister, Mary Musgrove, is a little more bearable, but she is also self-consequential, as evidenced by her disdain of the Hayters, her husband’s cousins. However, she finds Mary useful (selfishly so, but Anne wants to be useful) and although she never considers Anne’s comfort, the contrast between Anne’s life in her father’s house and the one in Mary’s, with her nearby warm and welcoming in-laws and the visits with the neighbors, is striking. Of course, Anne has to bear Mary’s whining.

Then there is Mrs. Cox, Elizabeth’s friend, a poor widow and daughter to Sir Walter’s lawyer, so of inferior station. Pretty much everyone except Sir Walter and Elizabeth understands that Mrs. Cox means to marry Sir Walter if she can. However, she isn’t actively malevolent, and the only aspect we see of her is excessive agreeableness (sycophancy?). As she is living with two such people and probably endures many humiliations, I sort of feel sorry for her.

Now, if you don’t want spoilers, skip this part, because it’s about Mr. William Elliot, the young, handsome, well-mannered relative, Sir Walter’s heir, whom Anne encounters briefly in Lyme and meets later in Bath. Everyone thinks he and Anne will make a match (except Elizabeth and Sir Walter, who think he’s after Elizabeth), but Anne has one safeguard—she has been in love with Captain Wentworth since she was 19. Also, she instinctively feels that there is something about Elliot she doesn’t understand. He turns out to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Wickham, although he doesn’t do anything as dastardly. Still, his attentions to Anne get in the way for a while of her gaining an understanding with Frederick Wentworth.

These negative characters are maybe a bit more nuanced but also more seriously depicted than equivalent characters in her other books, where they are often comic. They’re not at all funny in this book, and notice how almost all of them are related to Anne.

Austen is certainly a master at showing us people’s foibles in a way that is absolutely believable.

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Review 2647: The Darlings of the Asylum

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Violet Pring is more interested in her art than marriage, and she meets an artist, Mr. Lilley, who thinks she shows great promise. But it’s 1886, and Violet’s parents are pushing her to marry her childhood friend, Felix Skipp-Berlase. Felix is wealthy, and Violet’s parents want her taken care of, as they are broke. Felix is willing to have Violet continue her art career, but that doesn’t seem to cut any ice with Violet.

Violet’s mother is perennially ill, and she has a doctor, Dr. Rastrick, who makes Violet nervous. Violet finally agrees to marry Felix, but on the eve of the engagement party, she commits an indiscretion with Mr. Lilley. A few days later, Violet wakes up in Dr. Rastrick’s asylum.

The novel seems to be about Violet’s unfair incarceration because her ambitions are ahead of her time. However, we find that Violet is not altogether a reliable narrator, because she has memory lapses.

The thrust of this novel is confusing. At first, it seems that the evil scientist with absurd ideas about treating mental patients is dominating a gothic novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but this idea shifts and shifts again. And Violet’s adventures turn toward absurdity by the end.

I think O’Reilly has written more of a 21st century heroine than a 19th century one, and not a terribly convincing one. He also doesn’t seem to know what his own book is about—a girl learning how to take control of her own destiny? a girl learning to understand her parents better? a girl coming to sympathize with the stresses on women in poverty? the difference between Dr. Restrick’s approach and that of the new field of psychiatry? It doesn’t seem like he knows.

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Review 2634: Restless Dolly Maunder

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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.

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